Dr. Constantinos Kurt Wibmer is a South African virologist and structural biologist, with over a decade of experience in the fields of HIV-1 virology and HIV-1 vaccine design. He received his PhD in 2016 from the University of the Witwatersrand under the supervision of Prof Lynn Morris and Prof Penny Moore at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (National Health Laboratory Services) in Johannesburg, South Africa. As part of his graduate studies Kurt isolated neutralizing monoclonal antibodies from HIV-1 infected individuals and described the complex pathways exploited by the contemporaneous infectecting virus to escape these immune responses. His work has provided fundamental insights into the development of broadly neutralizing antibodies during infection. 

Kurt also received training in protein x-ray crystallography from Dr Peter Kwong and Dr Jason Gorman at the Vaccine Research Center (National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, USA, and did his postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Prof Ian Wilson at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, USA. He has since solved dozens of unique protein structures, characterizing at atomic resolution the interactions between antibodies and their antigens. Ultimately, Kurt is passionate about using the skills he has gained abroad to tackle some of the unique disease challenges relevant to LMICs, and hopes to contribute towards the growth of structural biology and rational protein design technologies in South Africa.