Fellow profile: Professor Wendy Burgers (South Africa)
EDCTP Senior Fellow Professor Wendy Burgers, was promoted to Full Professor at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, in January 2023, for her research, teaching and social responsiveness activities. In October 2023, she was inducted into the College of Fellows at UCT in recognition of her original, distinguished academic work. More recently, in March 2024, Prof. Burgers was awarded a Silver Medal award from the South African Medical Research Council for outstanding contributions to science.
During the pandemic, Prof. Burgers led the Cellular Immunity subgroup of the South African National COVID-19 Variant Consortium, a large group of local scientists who met weekly over the pandemic to address key research questions and share data. At this time, Prof. Burgers and her collaborators performed high impact studies describing the strength and duration of immunity to COVID-19 vaccination and infection, and the ability of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern to evade immunity. Her work in these areas has been highly cited and is published in the world’s leading science and medical journals, such as Science Translational Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. These studies informed our understanding of vaccine immune memory responses and shaping COVID-19 vaccination policy. Notably, her pioneering work on T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 culminated in paper in the scientific journal Nature, where her group was the first to show that T cell responses from COVID-19 vaccination could cross-react with the Omicron variant and vaccines would still provide protection against this highly mutated form of the virus.
As part of the COVID-19 response, she established the South African Medical Research Foundation-funded Clinical Cellular Immunology Platform at UCT, a hub for vaccine evaluation, clinical immunology research and capacity building, for new and existing viral pathogens and future epidemics and pandemics. She has subsequently expanded this capacity to include preclinical immunogenicity to support the development of locally-made mRNA vaccines.
Prof. Burgers served as a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 Vaccines of the Department of Health, Government of South Africa. In May 2024, Prof. Burgers will take up the role of Deputy Director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at UCT. The support of the EDCTP in the form of her Senior Fellowship was instrumental in her growth in research leadership and recognition of her research by her peers.