Stefan Kappe to Lead Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health
September 10, 2025
The internationally recognized malaria researcher will assume his role as director of the School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health early next year.
University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) Dean Mark T. Gladwin, MD, announced Sept. 9 the appointment of distinguished parasitologist and immunologist Stefan Kappe, PhD, to be the new director of the school’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD). He will also serve as the Myron M. Levine, MD, DTPH Professor of Vaccinology in the Department of Pediatrics.
Kappe is a professor and the associate vice chair of basic science research in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is also a senior principal investigator at the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, where he recently also served as an associate director. Dr. Kappe is internationally known for his transformational work in genetic engineering of parasites, which has led to a novel malaria vaccine type that demonstrated the potential to provide a high level of protection against malaria infection in preclinical models and a clinical study. He is also recognized for his landmark research on the early phases of malaria parasite infection in the liver.
He plans to begin his new position early next year; James Campbell, MD, MS, professor of pediatrics at UMSOM, will continue to serve as interim director of CVD until that time. He took over in July from Miriam Laufer, MD, who had been serving as interim director since April 2024.
Kappe’s laboratory focuses on understanding the complex pathobiology of malaria parasites and immune responses to infection, with the goal of designing transformational interventions that are more effective than current malaria treatments and vaccines. Along with his research team, he has pioneered functional genomics studies and reverse genetics studies of malaria parasites, laying the foundations for their in-depth biological investigation. They have used this knowledge to develop genetically engineered vaccine strains, which have become leading vaccine candidates and are currently tested in early-stage clinical trials in the U.S., Germany, and Burkina Faso.
Kappe has received more than $34 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funding sources such as the Gates Foundation since 2003, and he continues to have strong NIH funding support through P01, R01, and U01 grants. His research is focused on developing genetically engineered live-attenuated pathogens to optimize safety and potency against Plasmodium falciparum malaria infection as well as the identification of targets of protective immunity for subunit vaccine development. His team also investigates the molecular drivers of Plasmodium vivax, the parasite most responsible for recurrent malarial infections, and its persistence in the human liver to develop potential new therapeutics.
With a significant h-index of 65, Kappe’s research has been cited more than 6,300 times. He has authored or contributed to more than 280 publications, including 24 reviews on the basic science aspects of host-parasite interaction of malaria, pathophysiological and clinical aspects of Plasmodium infection, malaria vaccine development, and humanized mouse models of Plasmodium infection.
“Dr. Kappe has made it his life’s mission to develop a highly effective vaccine against malaria, which due to the limitations of the current immunizations, remains one of the greatest global health problems with hundreds of millions of infections and more than half a million deaths each year in the developing world,” said Dean Gladwin who is also the vice president for medical affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor. “His deep expertise in malaria biology and immunology, combined with his mentorship in basic and translational science, will strengthen CVD’s global leadership in combating malaria, tropical diseases, and emerging pandemics driven by climate change. I want to express my deepest appreciation to Dr. Campbell and Dr. Laufer for serving so adeptly at the helm of CVD until a permanent director could be appointed.”