Dr Nashied Peton

Nashied is a Molecular Biologist and HPCSA-accredited Medical Scientist.

He has several years of research experience in infectious disease immunology with a specific focus on host-directed therapies for Tuberculosis and HIV-1 infection. He obtained my PhD in Molecular Biology in 2013 under the mentorship of Professor Jonathan Blackburn in the Department of Integrated Biomedical Sciences at the University of Cape Town. The PhD focused on the development of an activity-based protein profiling array-based assay for the quantitative analysis of kinase inhibitor selectivity. Following his PhD, Nashied joined the Plant Molecular Physiology research group as a postdoctoral researcher focusing on understanding the physiology of a species of desiccation tolerant plants called Xerophyta Viscosa. In 2015, he joined the Wellcome Centre for Clinical Infectious Diseases Research in Africa (CIDRI-Africa) after being awarded a 1-year training fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation in 2015 where he began training as an infectious disease immunologist under the supervision and mentorship of Professor Robert John Wilkinson and Honorary Associate Professor Anna Kathleen Coussens. In 2016, he became the recipient of a Royal Society training grant where he spent a few months at the Francis Crick Institute in London learning aspects of gene silencing in primary human macrophages. In 2017 , he became the recipient of a prestigious Carnegie Corporation early career fellowship at CIDRI-Africa, and in 2018 was awarded an Australia Awards Africa Fellowship where he spent a further 2 years at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, conducting research in host-pathogen interactions with a focus on Tuberculosis and HIV-1 infection. He has several years of under- and -postgraduate supervision and training experience and possess extensive Biosafety Level 3 laboratory experience, both locally and internationally.

Nashied joined the H3D TB Biology team as an Investigator in April 2021, where he is involved in a number of TB drug discovery screening projects as well as determining the mechanism of action of promising compounds.