Meet Our Talent
Meet Stephen Kent
Professor Kent trained as an infectious diseases physician, immunologist and vaccine scientist in Melbourne and the USA. As a physician-scientist he is a national leader in developing and testing vaccines and concepts of immunity and is internationally recognised in this important field. His laboratory has developed exciting leads on analysing immune responses to COVID-19, HIV and Influenza that provide unique insights into the usefulness of various immune responses.
Stephen remains active in infectious diseases clinical medicine at the Alfred Hospital and Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, caring for people with HIV/AIDS and assisting in the clinical development of new vaccine and treatment strategies.
He was honoured to receive the Peter Doherty Outstanding PhD Supervisor award from the University of Melbourne and a National Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. Professor Kent was elected to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science in 2018 and recently received an MDHS team-based research award, leading a team studying COVID immunity.
We were humbled to receive a $3 million Medical Research Future Fund award in 2021 to study vaccines against the new COVID-19 variants. We’ve had a hugely productive 18 months understanding COVID immunity, with papers on new COVID vaccines, immune correlates of protection, durability of immunity in COVID, COVID monoclonal antibodies and more.