Professor Kelly Chibale who leads the team of scientists from H3-D, responsible for developing the malaria-fighting compound, joined UCT in 1996 as a lecturer and rose through the academic ranks to become full professor of organic chemistry from 2007. His research is in the field of drug discovery.

Chibale is a full member of the UCT Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IIDMM). In 2008 he was awarded a tier 1 South Africa Research Chair in Drug Discovery under the South Africa Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and administered through the National Research Foundation (NRF). In 2009 he became the founding director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Drug Discovery and Development Research Unit at UCT. In the same year, he was elected a life fellow of UCT and a fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. In 2010 he became the founding director of the UCT Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3-D).

Kelly obtained his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge in the UK with Stuart Warren in 1992. This was followed by postdoctoral stints at the University of Liverpool in the UK, as a British Ramsay Research Fellow with Nick Greeves (from 1992 to 1994), and at the Scripps Research Institute in the US as a Wellcome Trust International Prize Research Fellow with KC Nicolaou (from 1994 to 1996). He was a Sandler Sabbatical Fellow at the University of California San Francisco in the US (2002), a US Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in the USA (2008), and a visiting professor at Pfizer in the UK (2008).