Salim S. Abdool Karim is a South African public health physician, epidemiologist and virologist who has played a leading role in the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemic. His scientific contributions have impacted the landscape of HIV prevention and treatment, saving thousands of lives.
Career Karim is a professor at both the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and Columbia University in the United States. He was involved in the study. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Karim was chosen to lead a 45-person Ministerial Advisory Committee. The committee was intended to guide the South African government's response to the pandemic, and included several other medical experts. He was elected to be the Vice President for Outreach and Engagement of the International Science Council from 2021 to 2024 at the ISC General Assembly on 14 October 2021.
Education A second-generation South African of Indian heritage, he was born in 1960 in Durban and attended primary school in the Durban city centre before his family was forcibly relocated under apartheid’s racial Group Areas Act from Durban to Chatsworth, a racially segregated township in the south of the city. After completing high school in Durban in 1977, he attended the University of Natal’s medical school. Unable to afford university fees, he had to scrap his original plan to study engineering when he could secure scholarship funding only to study medicine. Despite this setback, he obtained a student loan whilst at medical school to concurrently study computer science and statistics via correspondence at the University of South Africa. Under the mentorship of pediatrician Jerry Coovadia, he conducted his first research project as a third-year medical student, leading to his first publication, a paper in the International Journal of Health Services. This publication highlighted several racial disparities in health status during apartheid.
Medical training In 1984, he completed his Internship at King Edward VIII Hospital, Durban, followed by an MRC research fellowship. He then joined the Department of Virology at the University of Natal in 1986, to start his doctoral research on Hepatitis B viral infection. He trained in Virology when it was not a recognized medical specialty but was subsequently awarded an Honorary Fellowship in Virology by the College of Medicine of South Africa in recognition of his seminal contributions in this discipline. In mid-1987, he went to New York on a Rockefeller fellowship to pursue a master's degree in epidemiology at Columbia University. In January 1988, he returned briefly to South Africa to marry Quarraisha Khan, a molecular biologist. During 1988, he also studied health economics at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and methods of epidemic investigations at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, USA. He returned to South Africa at the end of 1988 to contribute through research to addressing the burgeoning HIV epidemic in South Africa. This initiated his life-long collaboration with Quarraisha Abdool Karim, his wife, beginning their first joint study in 1989, which was one of the earliest community-based HIV surveys undertaken in Africa. In 1992, he started his specialist training in public health, completing his Fellowship in Public Health Medicine with the College of Medicine, South Africa, while simultaneously graduating with a Masters in Medicine degree in Community Health from the University of Natal. In 1999, he obtained a PhD in medicine from the University of Natal, based on his research on the epidemiology of Hepatitis B Virus infection in South Africa.
Research career In 1985, he spent a year post-internship conducting research at the SAMRC. In 1992, he joined the SAMRC as a senior epidemiologist and was appointed Director of the MRC's Centre for Epidemiological Research in South Africa (CERSA) in 1993. During his tenure, he built CERSA up as the largest medical research organization in South Africa, enabling it to play a leading role in public health, both locally and globally. Almost a decade later, he decided to switch to a leadership position in higher education, taking up the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor of research at the University of Natal in 2001. Following the post-apartheid merger of the Universities of Natal and Durban Westville in 2004, he developed and implemented a new research strategy for the newly formed University of KwaZulu-Natal with a focus on African scholarship. Karim is widely recognized for his visionary and bold leadership in conceptualizing and creating research institutions in South Africa. During his tenure at the MRC and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he created five new successful research centres – building research infrastructure and capacity in South Africa. He was the Principal Investigator of the grants that created the Wellcome Trust-funded Africa Centre for Population Studies and Reproductive Health in 1997, and the MRC's HIV Prevention and Vaccine Research Unit in 2000 with a $16million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2002, he secured a $15 million NIH grant to create the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA). He led the teams that established LifeLab, a $10 million biotechnology research centre in 2003 and the $70 million KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for TB and HIV (K-RITH), funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in 2007. Karim served as the founding director of four of these five research institutes and, in LifeLab, as its founding board chair.
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