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Ebola: Implications for Africa and understanding future epidemics
Streamed live on 16 Oct 2014 - the the University of Oxford, Oxford Martin School
About the speaker
Professor Peter Piot is the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a Professor of Global Health. Professor Piot is also a Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations. In 2009-2010 he was the Director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine, London. He was the founding Executive Director of UNAIDS and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1995 until 2008, and was an Associate Director of the Global Programme on AIDS of WHO. Under his leadership UNAIDS became the chief advocate for worldwide action against AIDS, also spear heading UN reform by bringing together 10 UN system organizations.
Professor Piot has a medical degree from the University of Ghent (1974) and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp (1980). In 1976 he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, the Free University of Brussels, and the University of Nairobi, was a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington, a Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He held the chair 2009/2010 "Knowledge against poverty" at the College de France in Paris, and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected a foreign member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, and is also an elected member of the Académie Nationale de Médicine of France, and of the Royal Academy of Medicine of his native Belgium, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
He was knighted as a baron in 1995 and has published over 550 scientific articles and 16 books, including his memior No Time to Lose. In 2013 he was the laureate of the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for Medical Research and in 2014 he received the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health.
Oxford Martin School,
University of Oxford