Valerie Mizrahi

Valerie Mizrahi was born in South Africa in 1958 and trained as a chemist before moving into microbiology, drawn to the biochemistry of bacteria that cause disease. She built her career studying Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium behind a disease that has killed people in South Africa at some of the highest rates in the world, worsened for decades by its overlap with the HIV epidemic.

Much of her research focused on how the bacterium repairs its own DNA and develops resistance to antibiotics, work that mattered directly to patients as drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis spread and became harder to treat with existing medicines. Rather than move her research abroad, where funding and equipment were easier to come by, she stayed in South Africa and helped build the institutions needed to do world-class molecular biology there.

She co-founded and directed research units at the University of Cape Town, including what became the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, training a generation of African scientists who might otherwise have had to leave the continent to do this kind of work. Her contributions were recognised internationally, including election as a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of relatively few South African scientists to receive that honour.

She has continued to argue that African diseases deserve African-led research, funded and staffed locally rather than treated as a problem to be solved elsewhere.