Shabir Madhi

Shabir A. Madhi is Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Shabir completed his under-graduate and post-graduate training at the University of the Witwatersrand, graduating with his MBBCh degree in 1990, Paediatric specialist training in 1996 and his Doctorate in Philosophy in 2004. He is certified in Paediatric Infectious diseases.

Shabir currently also currently holds the posts of Director of the South African Medical Research Council Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research (Wits-VIDA). Also, he is the co-founder and co-Director of the African Leadership in Vaccinology Expertise (ALIVE), a flagship program at the University of the Witwatersrand with the objective of building vaccinology expertise in Africa and fostering South-to-South collaborations. He is the past Chair of the National Advisory Group on Immunization (NAGI) in South Africa. From 2011-2017 he was the Executive Director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa. He has served on a number of WHO advisory and technical committees in the field of pneumonia and vaccines.

Shabir’s area of research expertise is focussed on epidemiology of respiratory, meningeal and diarrheal pathogens; clinical development of vaccines, and vaccine effectiveness studies. He also has a specific research focus on vaccines in people living with HIV, and vaccines in pregnant women. His research outputs to date includes pivotal efficacy studies on pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and rotavirus vaccine which informed WHO recommendations on the deployment of these vaccines in low-middle income countries. More recently he has led studies on influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and Group B streptococcus vaccines in pregnant women. He also led the first two Covid-19 vaccine trials done exclusively in Africa.

Shabir has lifetime achievement awards from the South African Medical Research Council life-time award (Platinum Medal) and the National Science and Technology Forum for his contribution to the field of Vaccinology; and Science-for-Society Gold Medal from the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF). He is graded as an Internationally Recognised Scientist in Vaccinology (A-rating) by the National Research Foundation of South Africa since 2012. To date he has supervised 27 PhD students from Southern Africa. Between 1997 and 2022, he has co-authored over 600 manuscripts primarily on vaccine preventable diseases, with a H-Index of 99.