Professor Robert Wilkinson has shed considerable light in areas such as TB-HIV drug interaction and the early detection of treatment response.
Wilkinson trained in clinical medicine at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and obtained his PhD from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital, London. He undertook specialist training in the London Deanery. He worked at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London and for the Lothian Health Board before moving to the North West London Hospitals NHS Trust. He is a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute Mill Hill Laboratory in London and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Clinical Science at Imperial College, London. Both positions are currently seconded to the University of Cape Town, where he is honorary professor in medicine and heads the UCT Clinical Infectious Diseases Research Initiative.
His current work deals with TB prevention, TB-related immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (TB-IRIS) and latent TB.
Wilkinson has published 146 original research articles in journals such as Nature, Lancet, PLoS Medicine and the Journal of Infectious Diseases. He has co-authored two books and six book chapters, co-filed two patents, and is an author of the Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine. He has served on the editorial boards of publications such as PLoS ONE and the International Journal of TB and Lung Disease. In addition to his research he has supervised 23 MSc and PhD students.
He has served on the advisory board of the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the pan-European TB-PANNET.
He was also a member of the management board of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis based at Stellenbosch University; the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland; and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London.