Peter Piot

Who is Peter Piot?

Baron Peter Piot, MD, PhD FRCP FMedSci is a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations, former Executive Director of the UN specialized agency UNAIDS, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a professor at Imperial College London. In 2004, he was awarded the Vlerick Award.

After he qualified as a Doctor of Medicine at the University of Ghent in 1974, he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976. In 1980 Peter Piot received a PhD degree in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp. He was also a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In the 1980s, Dr. Piot participated in a series of collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania and Zaire. Project SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire was the first international project on AIDS in Africa and is widely acknowledged as having provided the foundations of our understanding of HIV infection in Africa. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, and the Universities of Nairobi, Brussels, and Lausanne.

From 1991 to 1994, Dr. Piot was president of the International AIDS Society. 1992 he became Assistant Director of the World Health Organization's Global Programme on HIV/AIDS. On 12 December 1994, he was appointed Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations. He stepped down from this role in late 2008, at which time he was replaced by Michel Sidibé.