Lishomwa Ndhlovu

Lishomwa (Lish) Ndhlovu, M.D., Ph.D. is a Tenured Professor of Immunology in Medicine and Neuroscience in the Division of Infectious Diseases and at the Brain and Mind Research Institute. At Weill Cornell Medicine since 2019, the thrust of his research program is confronting the challenges of HIV and aging and developing specific strategies to prevent, slow or eliminate complications associated with HIV. Using state of the art immunological, virological and molecular epigenetic modalities, his research exploits this knowledge in developing novel disease predictor biomarker models and inform effective interventions through pre-clinical and clinical investigations across the ages, while also creating a precision level view for interventions towards HIV cure. Towards these efforts he is a co- Principal Investigator of the NIH-wide supported UM1 Martin Delaney Collaboratory HIV Cure consortium, ‘HOPE’, testing novel retroviral silencing and gene editing approaches toward a cure and two NIH-NIDA funded U01 ‘Weill Cornell-SCORCH’ consortium grants, documenting single cell substance use disorder responses in the brain in the setting of HIV. As a member of the International Neuro-HIV Cure Consortium, he is also creating a precision level view for interventions towards HIV clearance in the brain. With NIH R01 funding he is also evaluating engineered immunotherapies towards multitargeted HIV cure strategies. He serves as member of the UW/Fred Hutch CFAR External Advisory Committee, the NIH Office of AIDS Research Advisory Committee (OARAC, 2024-2027) and as Co-Editor in Chief of the journal ‘AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses’. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2021 and serve as Chair of the American foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) Scientific Advisory Committee (2021-2025) and the California HIV Research Program. He is deeply committed and active in teaching and mentoring students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty including under-represented minorities with many achieving independent faculty positions.