Naicker holds a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Witwatersrand. He joined the CSIR in 2014 and is a postdoctoral researcher in the development of point-of-care diagnostic and vaccine-matching tests for livestock diseases, as well as the development of high-content/throughput screening and automatable tools for accelerating proteomics research. He has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed papers, most recently on insights into reduced drug susceptibility and dimer stability.