BIOSKETCH
Jennifer Giandhari is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine and is the Head of Laboratory at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation & Sequencing Platform (KRISP) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). She obtained her PhD (2015) in virology at the University of Witwatersrand and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases. Her PhD dissertation contributed to HIV drug resistance research by identifying viral genetic variants and elucidating the underlying mechanism of resistance. Jennifer’s research interests include advancing the understanding of viral evolution, drug resistance mechanisms, and molecular epidemiology. As the laboratory head of KRISP, she has led groundbreaking studies on pathogen surveillance, including tuberculosis, HIV, cholera, SARS-CoV2 and the Dengue virus, which have contributed to local and international public health responses. She has published extensively in high-impact scientific journals, including Science and Cell. Her research is supported by grants from the National Research Foundation (NRF),and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). She is actively involved in raising funding and organizing KRISP-facilitated training programmes to provide young researchers with hands-on training in the laboratory. In 2024, she was awarded a Top 10 Published Young Researcher prize by UKZN.
