Nono Mkhize is a Senior Medical Scientist overseeing the HIV vaccine trial endpoints within the HIV Virology laboratory at the Centre for HIV & STI’s, NICD. She has a PhD in Medical Virology from the University of Cape Town (obtained in 2011) and has been based at the NICD for 11 years. She has extensive experience in multi-color flow cytometry which she used in her PhD to investigate the phenotype and poly-functionality of mucosal T cells during HIV infection. During her PhD, she was awarded a Columbia-Fogarty AITRP traineeship to visit the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) laboratory in Seattle, where she learned advanced flow cytometry techniques and panel design. Further flow cytometry training was undertaken at the NIH Vaccine Research Center in 2015 as part of a second Columbia-Fogarty traineeship. She has been involved in the isolation of antigen-specific B cells from HIV and SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals and contributed to a number of antibody-isolation based projects and publications. She is a recipient of the L’Oreal UNESCO sub-Saharan fellowship. She is also the laboratory lead of a paediatric HIV vaccine clinical trial (HVTN 135) enrolling infants in South Africa to test whether an HIV immunogen can give rise to bNAb precursors.
