Caroline Tiemessen

Education and career

As a young child, Tiemessen had a general interest in Science and was planning to become a geologist. However, the concept of mutation in micro-organisms, as taught to her in Grade 11, awoke her interest in biological sciences. While interested in medicine, her fear of needles precluded that avenue of study. Tiemessen went on to do a BSc at the University of the Witwatersrand and she completed her PhD in Virology there in 1992 with a thesis, presented to the Faculty of Medicine, entitled "The Defectiveness of the Subgroup F Adenoviruses in vitro".

She then spent three months in Israel studying blood dendritic cells and cytokines with Yechiel Becker and on her return to South Africa joined the National Institute of Virology (now the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD)). Caroline Tiemessen heads the Cell Biology Research Laboratory within the Centre for HIV and STIs at the NICD and is a research Professor in the School of Pathology at the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 2005, Tiemessen was awarded a Wellcome Trust International Senior Research Fellowship for 5 years to study protective immunity in the context of maternal-infant HIV-1 transmission. Tiemessen and her colleague Patrick Arbuthnot presented some of their research findings at the 6th Wits Faculty of Health Sciences Prestigious Research Lecture in November 2011, entitled "From target discovery to novel treatment for HIV-1". The research focused on both natural and acquired HIV immunity and how gene-manipulation could be used to achieve that.

In 2013 she was awarded the DST/NRF Research Chair of HIV Vaccine Translational Research in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.