Dr Elvis Banboye Kidzeru grew up in Nso, a village in the North West of Cameroon. As he grew up he noticed that many people were dying of infectious diseases because they were not diagnosed early enough and not due to absence of treatment. This challenged him to choose a field where he could impact populations’ health.
Dr Kidzeru holds an Honours degree in Laboratory Medicine (BMLS), MSc (Med) and PhD in Clinical Science and Immunology, investigating the impact of HIV-exposure on vaccines immunogenicity in South African infants. He has worked in several diagnostic laboratories in Cameroon and was Research Assistant at the University of the Western Cape. Dr Kidzeru was a Visiting Scientist at the Centre for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) in Washington State, USA. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, optimizing the Seahorse XFp Bioenergetic Analyzer to evaluate immune metabolic changes that may occur in regulatory pathways mediated by TB and HIV.
Dr Kidzeru is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hair and Skin Research Laboratory (HSR Lab) in the Division of Dermatology, Department of Medicine, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, exploring the immunological and metabolic changes that may occur in regulatory pathways in keloid disease (prevalent in Africans) and may be mediated by several drug targets.
