Professor Edward Rybicki

Prof Edward Rybicki trained plant virologist – BSc, Honours, Master’s and PhD degrees all from the University of Cape Town, with MSc and PhD in plant virology – he changed field in the 1990s due to funding for plant virus work drying up in South Africa. Part of the reason for the change to working on animal and human viruses (beak and feather disease virus of parrots, and HPVs and HIV) was his getting married to Anna-Lise Williamson in 1988, who said “Why don’t you work on something useful?” when he was looking for what to do with himself. Work on detection and genetic characterisation of HPV, HIV and other viruses led to working on vaccines for human papillomaviruses (HPV) and HIV in the late 1990s, and vaccinology became his research area until the present day.