Akuzike Kalizang’oma

Biography

Akuzike Kalizang’oma is a clinician, medical microbiologist, and postdoctoral researcher in pneumococcal genomics. He earned his PhD in pathogen genomics from University College London, with advanced training in pneumococcal genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Aku is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme (MLW) in Blantyre, Malawi, where he leads a portfolio of studies on the pneumococcus. His research focuses on optimising pneumococcal vaccine strategies, specifically evaluating booster schedules for the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) (2+1 vs. 3+0) and using genomic surveillance to identify pneumococcal lineages that evade vaccine control. He has also investigated the long-term impact of mass azithromycin administration on the emergence and expansion of multidrug-resistant non-vaccine-type pneumococcal lineages. Additionally, his work examines how vaccines, such as the malaria RTS,S vaccine, reduce antimicrobial prescribing and antimicrobial resistance among respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens. Aku is a 2024 Robert Austrian Research Award recipient in pneumococcal vaccinology and the 2025 Early Career Research Excellence Award recipient from the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences in Malawi. He is a 2025/2026 African Research Excellence Fellow and is currently undertaking a training fellowship in metagenomics at the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Genomics Research.

Awards