Elisabeth Gray Glenda

Gray is President/CEO of the South African Medical Research Council, Research Professor in Paediatrics at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Member (Professor) in the Vaccine & Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center, in Seattle. A Medical Doctor, specialising in Paediatrics, she started her research career in the field of preventing mother to child transmission of HIV-1 (PMTCT). She was awarded a Fogarty Fellowship to study clinical epidemiology at Cornell and Columbia Universities (1999), enabling her to broaden her investigative interests to include: clinical trial design; vaccine. She developed her research in post-natal transmission, focusing on breast-feeding, infant survival and post-exposure prophylaxis. Gray collaborated in multi-country efforts to find short-course and affordable antiretroviral interventions for PMTCT. She co-founded with James McIntyre the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU) at Baragwanath Hospital, which is now a world-renowned research unit focused on HIV prevention and treatment with grants awarded through competitive international processes from the NIH, USAID, amongst others, amounting to over R120 million pa.