Professor Glenda Gray is the President of the Medical Research Council in South Africa, a non-Executive Director at the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU), in Soweto, South Africa, and a Professor of Paediatrics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her prior research has focused on: prevention of mother to child transmission studies, paediatric treatment trials, large scale HIV clinical trials (including HIV vaccine trials); TB, influenza and HPV vaccine studies in infants, children, adolescents and adults. She has been the recipient of multiple grants from the NIH, including an R21 and a U01. In 2009, she received the N’Galy Mann Lectureship award at The Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).
Professor Gray has been the Soweto Clinical Trials Unit PI since 2010. In addition, she is the HVTN Co-PI, and Director of International/Africa Programs. Prof. Gray has been involved in HIV research in South Africa for more than a decade. She is currently leading the clinical development of South Africa’s first two HIV vaccines. She has expertise in HIV prevention in adolescents, and is the co-chair for a pivotal study investigating the efficacy of coitally dependent tenofovir gel, called FACTS 001. This multi-centered study involves multiple clinical trial sites, and is a purely South African run consortium, giving Prof. Gray the necessary experience and expertise in leading multi-centered studies. Prof. Gray serves on the WHO/UNAIDS Vaccine Advisory Board, and on the DSMB for two vaccine studies in Africa. She chairs the standing committee on health, for the Academy of Science, and represent the academy in the South African National Research Committee. As a recently inducted member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, US, she served on the Global Health Committee, and the Vaccine Committee.