Francis M. Ndungu

I'm a Kenyan immunologist, and I've spent my career asking one question: how does our immune system learn to fight malaria, and how can we help it do better?

I'm based at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, a small town on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast and one of the best places in the world to study malaria. I lead a research group here and have chaired the Bioscience Department.

I trained as a science teacher at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, then took a detour into parasites with an MSc in Medical Parasitology. That detour became a career. I moved to London for a PhD and postdoctoral work at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research, then came home to Kilifi in 2008 to study immunity where malaria actually happens.

Today I also collaborate with Karolinska Institutet (working with Anna Färnert's group since 2013), the University of Oxford, Pwani University and the University of Glasgow. Along the way I've published more than 85 research papers and won funding from CEPI, the NIH, EDCTP and the UK Medical Research Council.

Away from the lab, I co-founded the Tunaweza Education Trust ("tunaweza" means "we can" in Swahili). It helps bright children from poor families go to secondary school.

Why do some people stay healthy when malaria strikes again, while others fall ill? That's the puzzle my group works on. Our immune system remembers infections it has met before, but with malaria that memory is often patchy and fades quickly. We want to understand why, and use that knowledge to design better vaccines. We work mainly on malaria, and since 2020 also on COVID-19. Our research is built on two special resources in Kilifi: - Groups of local children whose health and immunity we have followed for many years. - Carefully controlled studies in which adult volunteers, who have had malaria before, receive a small dose of the parasite under close medical care. This lets us see, in real time, which immune responses actually protect. Our main questions: - Memory: How long do antibodies and "memory" immune cells last, and what makes them wake up and respond when they are needed? - Brakes on immunity: Repeated infections can tire out the immune system or switch it into "brake" mode. How does this let the parasite slip through? - Vaccines: What does a protective immune response look like after malaria vaccines (RTS, S and R21) and COVID-19 vaccines? - The bigger picture: How do worm infections, low iron and HIV change the way people fight malaria? Together with Karolinska Institutet, we compare people in Kenya, who meet malaria again and again, with Swedish travellers and migrants, who may meet it only once. Setting the two side by side shows us what repeated infection does to immune memory, and what a single infection leaves behind.

I started out as a trained science teacher, and I've never really stopped teaching. In Kenya, I teach immunology of infectious diseases at Pwani University in Kilifi. Further afield, I have taught on the IDA immunology course in Cape Town, South Africa, sharing what we've learned about immune memory in malaria with young scientists from across the continent. I'm especially proud to have co-founded AfriBOP, a hands-on training course for early-career African scientists studying parasites and the immune system, where I also teach. I've also helped run career-development workshops for emerging African science leaders. Much of my teaching happens in the lab. I have supervised or co-supervised 8 PhD students, 13 MSc students, research interns and 3 postdoctoral fellows. They have come through the Open University, Oxford, Glasgow, Freie Universität Berlin and Karolinska Institutet, where I have co-supervised four PhD students with Anna Färnert and hosted them in Kilifi for their fieldwork. Many of my former students now lead research of their own in Kenya, the UK and beyond. For eight years (2014–2022) I coordinated research degrees at KEMRI-Wellcome, helping make sure our PhD students got training that met international standards. I'd love to contribute to teaching at KI in immunology, infection biology and global health.