Professor Helen Rees is internationally recognised as an award-winning global health practitioner who has dedicated her professional career to improving public health in South Africa, Africa and globally. Helen is the Executive Director of Wits RHI, University of the Witwatersrand, and Co-Director of the Wits African Leadership in Vaccinology Expertise Flagship programme. Helen is recognised as a leader in HIV, SRH, vaccine preventable diseases and global health security and has chaired and served on many national and global scientific committees and boards. In addition, Helen is respected for her work in drug regulation and she chairs the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority Board and serves on WHO’s committee assessing WHO listed authorities. She has an international reputation for her research and policy work on vaccines and immunisation, being the past chair of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation, the current chair of the WHO African Regional Immunization Technical Advisory Group and the co-chair of the SAGE working group on Ebola Vaccines. She served on many WHO, Gavi and national Covid-19 committees including being the co-chair of the COVAX Independent Product Group. In the field of global health security she chairs the WHO’s IHR Emergency Committee on Polio having served on three other IHR emergency committees.
She is a member of the Africa CDC Emergency Committee, a member of WHO’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards and is co-chair of the South African Incident Management Team on Mpox, overseeing the national response to two Mpox outbreaks. Helen is co-chair of the WHO’s Poxvirus Collaborative Open Research Consortium. Helen has won many international and national awards for her contribution to global health and to science, including being made an Officer of the British Empire and an Officer of the French National Order of Merit for her contribution to global health and the COVID-19 response, and receiving the South African National Order of the Baobab for her contribution to medicine and to medical research. She received the Platinum South African National Batho Pele Award for excellence in contribution to the South African COVID-19 response. In 2025 she received the WHO’s prestigious Dr Jee Jong-wook “memorial prize for public health” award. In 2022 she was named a ‘standout voice’ in African public health by Harvard Public Health.
