Prof Tulio de Oliveira is the Director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP) and Bioinformatician at UKZN is a world-renowned bioinformatician who identified a new variant of COVID-19 in South Africa in December 2020, in 2021 he set up a new institute at Stellenbosch University (SU) aimed at understanding and controlling epidemics and pandemics in Africa. Prof De Oliveira speaks on his career, upbringing and what to make of the reports around the new 'highly virulent' HIV strain discovered in the Netherlands.