Professor Anthony D. Kelleher is a clinician scientist. He graduated in Medicine from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1986. He trained in internal medicine and pathology at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney at the height of the HIV epidemic, qualifying as a Clinical Immunologist and Immunopathologist in 1995. Professor Kelleher completed his PhD in 1997, describing the modulation of the HIV-infected immune system by a range of experimental clinical interventions, including therapeutic vaccines and IL-2. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Oxford at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and Nuffield Department of Medicine, where he studied the coevolution of HIV and the viral immune response. Professor Kelleher returned to Sydney in 2001 to join an Australian consortium developing a prophylactic HIV vaccine based on a prime boost strategy, which successfully completed clinical trials in Australia and Thailand. Professor Kelleher was appointed Director of the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney in early 2019. He is also head of the Kirby Institute’s Immunovirology and Pathogenesis Program, and Principal of the Infection Immunology and Inflammation Theme at UNSW Medicine. As a clinical academic at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, Professor Kelleher is responsible for the clinical care of patients with HIV infection and autoimmune diseases, as well as for the oversight of the NSW State HIV Reference laboratory.
Chantelle L Ahlenstiel is a Senior Lecturer at the Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She completed her B.Adv.Sc (Hons) in 2000 at the University of Sydney (USyd) and her PhD at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research, USyd, in 2004. Her research activities include developing RNA therapeutics based on RNA interference for multiple infectious diseases, including HIV, HTLV-1, HPV and EBV. Her research group also investigates the components and mechanisms involved in RNA-directed transcriptional gene silencing, specifically short interfering RNA (siRNA) and short hairpin RNA (shRNA), to control virus replication. She has 30 publications with 1196 citations and an h-index of 15 (Scopus, 3 November 2023).
