Collen Masimirembwa is a scientist and academician specialising in drugs and diagnostics innovation for Africa. He currently serves as the chief executive officer and founding president and of the African Institute of Biomedical Science and Technology (AiBST) in Harare, Zimbabwe. Born in 1967 in Zimbabwe, he pursued studies in biochemistry and pharmacology at the University of Zimbabwe and at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He is Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand. After a ten-year work experience as a Principal Scientist at AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical Company, he returned to Zimbabwe with a vision to build capacity for drug discovery and development in Africa. To accomplish this, he attracted research-funding support from various international funding organisations, including pharmaceutical companies. His research on the genomics of African populations and its implications for drug discovery, development, and deployment have won him many national, regional, and international awards-including the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) award for innovative genomics research in Africa (2017) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMG) Calistous Juma Science Leadership award (2021). Collen is a highly published and cited researcher and is a fellow of the Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences (ZAS) and of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS).