Professor Philip Bejon

Professor Philip Bejon has worked in Kenya since 2002 when he worked on Phase I and IIb clinical trials of a candidate malaria vaccine based on viral vectors, working between the Jenner at University of Oxford and KEMRI-Wellcome. He returned to Oxford in 2006 to complete specialist clinical training as a clinical lecturer, and was appointed as a senior fellow in the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre in 2009. He remained active in malaria research during these posts, leading further trials of Glaxo SmithKline’s (GSK) candidate malaria vaccine “RTS,S”, and as a member of the Malaria Vectored Vaccine Consortium funded to test viral vectored malaria vaccines in several sites in Africa including Kilifi, Kenya. A Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinician-Scientist Fellowship, allowed him to return to be resident full-time in Kilifi in 2013, working on heterogeneity of malaria transmission, and he became Executive Director of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in September 2014. His current interests still include malaria vaccines, as well as Yellow Fever and Ebola vaccines, studies of malaria transmission dynamics including genotyping and work on a human malaria challenge model to study acquired immunity.