Tulio de Oliveira, PhD, is the director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI) at Stellenbosch University and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). Deputy director of the Genomic Surveillance Unit (Wellcome Sanger Institute) since January 2024. He played a leading role in the response to COVID-19 in South Africa through his visionary application of genomics and bioinformatics. Prof. de Oliveira is a Professor of Bioinformatics at the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, Stellenbosch University and at the College of Health Sciences at UKZN.

He was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, U.K. from 2004 to 2006 and a Newton Advanced Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and at the University of Edinburgh from 2015-2019. In 2015, he became a Professor at UKZN and in 2018, Associate Professor on Global Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA and in 2021, he became a Professor at Stellenbosch University.
Prof. de Oliveira has worked for over 20 years with viral outbreaks, including HIV, Hepatitis B and C, Chikungunya, Dengue, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, and Yellow Fever Virus. Prof. de Oliveira has more than 300 publications, with many of them in high impact scientific journals.

These contributions have significantly advanced our understanding of these pathogens and their impact on public health. The scientific community has recognized Prof. de Oliveira's exceptional contributions. In 2021, he was included in Nature's list of ten scientists driving scientific developments. The MIT Technology Review also acknowledged his leadership as one of the pioneers of ten breakthrough technologies in 2022. In the same year, he received the Gold Medal Award from the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) for his outstanding contributions to the field. Additionally, the Government of South Africa bestowed upon him the Batho Pele Award for his remarkable societal impact and he was the co-recipient of the German Africa Prize in 2022 for his contributions towards identifying the COVID-19 Omicron variant. Most recently, the Portuguese President awarded him the Order of Merit Medal and he was the recipient of the Discovery Health Lifetime Achievement Award. He was listed among TIME100 most influential people of 2022 and TIME100 Health 2024.