Max Theiler

Max Theiler (1899 to 1972) was a South African-American virologist and physician who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for developing a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937, becoming the first African-born Nobel laureate. Born in Pretoria, he attended Pretoria Boys High School, Rhodes University College and University of Cape Town Medical School, graduating in 1918, and earned a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene in London in 1922. That year he moved to the Harvard University School of Tropical Medicine, where he began work on yellow fever with Andrew Sellards, and in 1930 he moved to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, becoming director of its Virus Laboratory.