Tomáš is a Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the University of Oxford and a Distinguished Professor at Kumamoto University in Japan. He has devoted his entire professional career to the development of a universal HIV-1 vaccine protecting against most global virus variants, including escape mutants. His basic research aims to understand what constitutes protective killer T cells against viral infections, as well as vaccine design and construction, and testing novel vaccine strategies in pre-clinical models while focusing on iterative improvements of the vaccine design driven by human data. He oversees a programme of experimental medicine trials in the UK, Europe, the US and Africa. Tomáš and his partners aim to enhance research capacity and infrastructure on the African continent.