Professor Tulio de Oliveira of UKZN has been named in TIME Magazine’s inaugural 2024 TIME100 Health list, a new annual collection that honours the 100 people who have had the greatest impact on world health this year.
This award, selected by TIME's international network of editors, thought leaders, and past honorees, is De Oliveira’s second appearance in TIME’s influential rankings, following his appearance on the 2022 list of the world’s most influential people.
De Oliveira is a prominent genomics scientist. He is the director of Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI), the director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) at the UKZN, and the deputy director of the Genomic Surveillance Unit at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.
“I am deeply honoured to be recognised once again by TIME Magazine and to be included in the distinguished TIME100 Health list of 2024. This acknowledgement underscores the importance of collaborative research efforts in addressing global health challenges,” De Oliveira said.
He added, “Once I saw that the Covid-19 pandemic was receding, I decided to work with our team of over 100 scientists in South Africa and with the largest genomics facility in the world, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, to create a new programme of work - this time to fight the multiple diseases that are being amplified by climate change, such as dengue, chikungunya, the Zika virus, influenza and cholera.”
In 2021, De Oliveira headed a pioneering multidisciplinary team of researchers and scientists in the discovery of the Omicron form of SARS-CoV-2, which quickly became the dominant global variation of the virus.
In 2020, he led the team that identified the SARS-CoV-2 Beta mutation.
De Oliveira has headed several scientific networks in South Africa and Africa over the last few decades, and in 2023, he established the Climate Amplified Diseases and Epidemics (CLIMADE) consortium, a global partnership dedicated to characterising diseases and infections amplified by climate change.
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