Prof Kelly Chibale [Director of the UCT Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre and an IDM Member]

Host: Dr Kathryn Wicht

Prof Kelly Chibale is a full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where he holds the Neville Isdell Chair in African-centric Drug Discovery & Development. He is also a Full Member of the UCT Institute of Infectious Disease & Molecular Medicine, founding Director of the South African Medical Research Council Drug Discovery & Development Research unit at UCT, the Founder and Director of the UCT Holistic Drug Discovery and Development (H3D) Centre, a Johnson and Johnson (J&J) Satellite Centre for Global Health Discovery. He is also a founding Director and CEO of the H3D Foundation.

Kelly obtained his PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in the UK. This was followed by postdoctoral stints at the University of Liverpool in the UK and at the Scripps Research Institute in the USA. He was a Sandler Sabbatical Fellow at the University of California San Francisco, a US Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and a Visiting Professor at Pfizer in the UK.

Kelly has received many notable awards and honors, which include holding a South African National Research Foundation (NRF) A-rating, being named by Fortune magazine as one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders in 2018, being named as one of the 22 black biotech leaders in honour of Juneteenth in the USA on a 2021 list published by the Timmerman Report, which celebrates innovative black leaders who are change-makers in their respective fields, and in 2022 being named as one of the 25 standout voices in African public health by Harvard University’s Public Health magazine. He serves as the Editor-In-Chief of the American Chemical Society (ACS) publication ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.