Top Award for Research on the African Continent Awarded to Wits Researcher
- L.Rautenbach
Professor Lynn Morris received the prestigious Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, considered an equivalent to the Nobel Prize, on 2 June 2017.
The award, with a monetary value of R1, 5m, is made annually to encourage excellence in scholarship and acknowledge cutting-edge, internationally significant work. Awardees are leading scholars who have a sustained record of outstanding research and intellectual achievement at the highest level. They must have demonstrated a capacity for and a commitment to knowledge transfer to their fellow citizens. Up to now, the Award has only been presented to South Africans or South Africa-based academics.
Morris is an alumna of Wits University where she earned Bachelors of Science and Honours degrees. She earned her DPhil at the University of Oxford, after which she was awarded a Royal Society Florey Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral study in Australia. On her return to South Africa, she joined the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). Currently, she is the Head of the HIV Virology Laboratory within the Centre for HIV & STIs based at the NICD at the National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS). She holds a joint appointment as Research Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits University and as Research Associate at the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA). She has devoted the best part of the last twenty years to the search for an HIV vaccine.
Morris is internationally recognised for her work in understanding how the antibody response to HIV develops. The rapid mutability of the virus means that the ‘standard’ antibody response is quickly obsolete in an infected individual. She has been prominent in studying the rare appearance in some patients of so-called broadly neutralising antibodies which can attack a broad range of mutated viruses. This work is currently one of the most promising leads towards the production of an effective anti-HIV vaccine.
Morris plans on using the Oppenheimer Fellowship to develop a novel antibody-based approach for the prevention of HIV infection in women. This project will make use of an antibody, which shows exceptional antiviral activity against HIV that she and her team and collaborators in the USA, isolated from an HIV-infected woman living in KwaZulu-Natal.
Morris is the fifth scientist from Wits to earn the distinguished fellowship since its initiation in 2001. Other Harry Oppenheimer Fellows from Wits include Professor Helen Rees (2014) for Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the Wits Reproductive Health & HIV Institute (WRHI); Professor Duncan Mitchell (2010) for Physiology; Professor Norman Owen-Smith (2005) for Environmental Sciences; and Professor David Glasser (2001) for Chemical Engineering.