Prof. Sharon Lewin

Sharon Lewin is the inaugural director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital; Melbourne Laureate Professor of Medicine, University of Melbourne; and the inaugural director of the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics, Melbourne, Australia. The Cumming Centre was established following a philanthropic gift of $250 million from Canadian philanthropist Mr Geoff Cumming and $75 million from the Victorian government. She is an infectious diseases physician and virologist. She completed her medical degree and PhD in virology at Monash University in 1996, her infectious diseases training in Melbourne at the Royal Melbourne and Fairfield hospitals and her post-doctoral fellowship with Dr David Ho at Rockefeller University in 1999. She is recognised globally for her research aimed at finding a cure for HIV. She played a key role in Australia’s response to COVID-19 through the work of the Doherty Institute and senior advisory roles to the Victorian and Australian governments. In 2014 she was named Melburnian of the Year and in 2019 was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia for services to infectious diseases and HIV/AIDS. She is the immediate past President of the International AIDS Society, which has 17,000 members globally. She holds honorary doctorates from Latrobe University, Monash University, Aarhus University in Denmark and University of Bonn in Germany. She is President of the scientific advisory board of the ANRS/MIE (the major funding agency for infectious disease in France) and a member of the scientific advisory board for PREPARE (Singapore’s national pandemic preparedness program) and the Stavros Nachos Foundation Institute for Global Infectious Diseases Research, based at Rockefeller University, New York.