Zelda joined CHIL in September 2022 to manage projects and operational aspects of CHIL’s laboratory and clinical research studies. Originally from South Africa, Zelda completed her PhD in April 2012 at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands under the mentorship of Prof. Hanneke Schuitemaker, where she studied the interaction of neutralizing antibodies and HIV disease progression. She then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Galit Alter at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Boston, USA, where she studied the optimization of antibody Fc-mediated killing in a shock-and-kill approach in HIV latency models. Before coming to CHIL, Zelda worked at Janssen Vaccines, the Netherlands, between 2016-2022 as a Senior Project Lead in the Clinical Immunology department overseeing the immunogenicity testing under GCLP in several clinical vaccine studies towards HIV, RSV and other infectious diseases.
