Dr. John Shiver is Vice President, Worldwide Basic Research Franchise Head, Vaccines. He is responsible for the worldwide leadership of vaccine basic research for the Infectious Diseases Franchise leading the teams of scientists working to develop novel vaccines against a broad range of diseases, including HIV/AIDS, human papillomavirus, rotavirus, zoster, influenza and bacterial infections.

Dr. Shiver has gained international recognition in the scientific community for his leadership of Merck’s novel HIV vaccine research program. He has led Merck’s HIV-1 vaccine research team since 1992 playing an instrumental role in the development of vaccines based on gene delivery technologies and of quantitative immunological assays to measure T cell immune responses.

After graduating with a B.S. degree in Chemistry/Mathematics from Wofford College, Dr. Shiver received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Florida, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at Purdue University. He joined Merck in 1991 following four years as a Senior Staff Fellow in the Experimental Immunology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Dr. Shiver is an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Virology and Drug Discovery Today: Disease Mechanisms. He is a member of the NIH HIV-1 Vaccine Testing Network Laboratory Science Advisory Committee and the Aeras Immunology Technical Advisory Group (a nonprofit group dedicated to the development of tuberculosis vaccines), and the External Steering Committee for the Emory University Vaccine Center. He is on the Executive Board of the International Society of Vaccines and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania College of Medicine in Philadelphia.

Dr. Shiver is the author of more than 100 articles that have been published in leading scientific journals, including Science, Nature, Cell, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, Dr. Shiver is a co-author of 24 awarded patents covering his contributions in the field of novel vaccine development.