Max Theiler

Max Theiler (1899 to 1972) was a South African-American virologist and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for developing a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937, which made him the first African-born Nobel laureate. Born in Pretoria, he was educated in South Africa through the completion of his medical degree, then went to London for postgraduate work at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, earning a 1922 diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene. That year he moved to the United States to do research at the Harvard University School of Tropical Medicine, and he lived and worked in that nation for the rest of his life. In 1930 he moved to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, where he became director of the Virus Laboratory.