Professor Sharon Lewin is the inaugural director of the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne; consultant physician, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Australia; and an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Practitioner Fellow. She is an infectious diseases physician and basic scientist and an internationally recognised expert on HIV disease and pathogenesis. She was previously Head, Department of Infectious Diseases, The Alfred Hospital and Monash University (2003 – 2014) and Co-head, Centre for Biomedical Research, Burnet Institute (2010-2014), Melbourne, Australia.

She completed her medical training at Monash University, followed by a PhD in virology at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, The Rockefeller University in New York. Her laboratory focuses on strategies to cure HIV infection, immune reconstitution following antiviral therapy and the pathogenesis of HIV-hepatitis B co-infection.

Professor Lewin has received continuous research funding from the NHMRC since 1993 and funding from the National Institutes for Health, the Wellcome Trust and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. She was the local co-chair of the XXth International AIDS Conference (AIDS2014), which was held in Melbourne July 2014, and was the largest health conference ever held in Australia. She was previously President of the Australian Society for HIV Medicine (2005-2007), is on the leadership team of the International AIDS Society’s Strategy Towards an HIV Cure and a member of the Australian Government Ministerial Advisory Committee on Blood Borne Viruses and Sexually Transmitted Infections.