Invited Speakers
International
Roy M. Gulick, MD, MPH
Dr Gulick is Director of the Cornell HIV Clinical Trials Unit and Professor of Medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City. Dr Gulick’s research interests include designing, conducting and analyzing clinical trials to refine antiretroviral therapy strategies and assess antiretroviral drugs with new mechanisms of action. He currently serves as Principal Investigator of the Cornell Clinical Trials Unit and as Chairman of the Optimization of Antiretroviral Therapy Committee of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. He also serves as a Board Member of the International AIDS Society-USA and as a member of the Panel on Clinical Practices for Treatment of HIV Infection of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the International AIDS Society and has presented at national and international meetings and published widely in the field of HIV/AIDS.
Professor Adeeba Kamarulzaman is presently the Head and Professor of Infectious Diseases, at the University of Malaya where she oversees the running of an HIV/AIDS tertiary referral and research center in Kuala Lumpur.
In addition to her clinical and academic commitments, she has been actively involved in the community response to HIV/AIDS in Malaysia. As convenor of the Malaysian Harm Reduction Working Group of the Malaysian AIDS Council, she successfully led the advocacy for the implementation of harm reduction including oral substitution therapy and needle syringe programs in Malaysia in 2005. She was elected President of the Malaysian AIDS Council, the umbrella organization for all AIDS NGOs in Malaysia in January 2006. In this capacity she has been further involved in advocating for and overseeing the implementation of community-based HIV/AIDS programmes across the country. She is presently the Chair of the TREAT Asia Steering Committee, and is a member of the Executive Committee and Advisory Boards of the International Harm Reduction Association and the International Harm Reduction Development, as well as the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Additionally she is an Executive Committee member of the United Nations Regional Task Force on HIV Prevention Amongst Drug Users and a member of the United Nations Reference Group on HIV and Injecting Drug Use.
Gita Ramjee, Director, HIV Prevention Research Unit, Medical Research Council, Durban, South Africa.
Gita Ramjee is the Director of the South African Medical Research Council's HIV Prevention Research Unit and Director of the HIV/AIDS lead program. She was awarded distinguished visiting professor by Tamil Naidu Medical University in Chennai, India. In 1988, she joined the department of Pediatrics, University of Kwazulu Natal to complete a Masters degree studying fungal diseases in malnourished children . She then went on to complete her PhD in kidney diseases of childhood. In the Early nineties, she joined the Medical research Council to work on HIV/AIDS and in particular women initiated HIV prevention options. She is well known for her work on HIV prevention trials. Her Unit is the only one worldwide which conducted 4 Phase III and 1 Phase IIB trial of women initiated prevention methods consecutively. She has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publication and serves as a reviewer for numerous International journals and research organizations. In 2006, she was a finalist in the science category of the Woman of the Year award in South Africa. She is an invited member of several societies in recognition for her contribution to the field of HIV prevention.
Sarah Rowland-Jones qualified in medicine from Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and trained in Infectious Diseases in London and Oxford. She began her research career in Oxford with Professor Andrew McMichael on the role of cellular immune responses to viral infections. Since 1995 she has led a research group in the MRC Human Immunology Unit in Oxford, studying the role played by cytotoxic T-cells in determining the outcome of HIV infection, as well as dengue and influenza virus infections. A key focus of the work has been the study of immune responses to HIV in people with an unusually good outcome of their exposure to the virus. Since 2004 she has worked as Director of Research in the MRC laboratories in the Gambia, the UK's oldest and largest overseas research unit, which has led to a shift in her research focus towards understanding the pathogenesis of and immune response to HIV-2 infection in West Africa.
Bruno Spire is a social researcher in Marseilles, France. Born in 1960, he got his MD degree in 1985. He obtained his PhD in virology in 1990. In the early 1980's he worked in the laboratory at the Institut Pasteur with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and participate to the first studies aimed at characterizing HIV. In the 90's he worked in HIV molecular virology on the role of the vif accessory gene. In 1999, he switches to social sciences and public health issues and focused his work on adherence to antiretroviral treatment, quality of life and risky behaviors of people living with HIV/AIDS. He has a permanent position in the French National Research Institute for Medical Research and leads his own group in the field of public health applied to HIV. Dr. Spire is openly HIV-positive and is the new President of the French community-based NGO AIDES.
Pietro Vernazza has received his training in internal medicine and infectious diseases in St.Gallen, Switzerland and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since the early 90ies he focussed his clinical research on cofactors of sexual transmission of HIV and has started in the past 6 years to systematically investigate options for simplified maintenance treatment with PI monotherapy for HIV. Dr. Vernazza is a member of the Swiss HIV Cohort where he chaired the Scientific Board from 2001 to 2007. Since 2000 he is head of the Division of Infectious Diseases of a tertiary hospital in Eastern Switzerland, St. Gallen. He is currently the president of the Swiss Federal Commission on AIDS.
Robin Wood, B Sc, BM MMED, FCP (SA), completed his undergraduate training at Oxford and London University, and carried out post-graduate training in Internal Medicine at the University of Cape Town, and Infectious Diseases training at Stanford Medical School, California. Since 1993 he supervised the first dedicated HIV clinic in the Western Cape at Somerset Hospital (Cape Town, South Africa). He has overseen the development of HIV care services within the public sector at secondary hospital, community health and primary health clinic levels. Professor Wood is currently the Director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre. He supervises the largest community ART clinic in the Western Cape and the TB/HIV Research programme in Masiphumelele, a local township. His major research interests are in the fields of infectious diseases and HIV. He has published widely in the areas of HIV management, tuberculosis interaction with HIV and new drug development.
David Wilson has worked in the field of HIV prevention for over 20 years as an academic and practitioner. He is currently Acting Director and Lead Health Specialist in the Global HIV/AIDS Program of the World Bank. He holds an Adjunct Professorial positions at the Centre for International Health at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. He has worked in over 50 countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean, He has also consulted on HIV prevention for several international agencies, including AUSAID, DFID, EU, USAID, UNAIDS, UNICEF, USAID and the World Bank. His major research and applied interests are in the use of surveillance systems to characterize, HIV epidemics, understand critical HIV/AIDS transmission dynamics and intervention priorities and to promote HIV prevention responses that are grounded in a thorough understanding of national and local HIV epidemics - an understanding of the "last 1,000 infections" in a given context.
Australian
Professor Chris Burrell, School of Molecular and Biomedical Science, The University of Adelaide
Professor Martyn French is a Clinical Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Western Australia and a Clinical Immunologist at Royal Perth Hospital and PathWest Laboratory Medicine, Perth, Australia. He has been interested in the management of patients with acquired and primary immunodeficiency disorders since 1980 and has conducted research on the immunology of HIV infection since 1986. He is currently a member of INSIGHT Network Immunology Group. He has participated in the Australian HIV clinical trials program since the late 1980s and is currently Chair of the Antiretroviral Working Group of The National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research. His area of particular expertise is disorders of immune reconstitution in HIV patients receiving antiretroviral therapy and he first described immune restoration disease in 1992. He is an author of over 170 publications and a member of the editorial boards of AIDS and Clinical Immunology.
Paul Gorry completed his PhD in 1998, which examined mechanisms controlling HIV replication in brain astrocytes. From 1999 to 2002 he undertook postdoctoral studies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he researched mechanisms contributing to neurotropism and neurovirulence of HIV and host factors contributing to HIV transmission and persistence. In 2002 he returned to the Burnet Institute to Head the HIV Molecular Pathogenesis Laboratory. Paul is presently Principal Fellow of the Burnet Institute Faculty, Associate Professor in the department of Medicine at Monash University, and Associate Professor in the department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. His major research interests are pathogenesis of CCR5-restricted HIV variants, structure-function relationships of the HIV Env glycoproteins, and HIV neuropathogenesis.
Professor Simon Mallal is Director of the Institute for Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Murdoch University and Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia. He studied Medicine at the University of Western Australia and has managed patients with HIV, autoimmune and allergic disease in Perth since 1987 and supervises the associated routine diagnostic immunology and molecular biology laboratory. He is a Clinical Immunologist trained in Internal Medicine and Pathology and completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
He has had a longstanding research interest in the genes which influence the outcomes of HIV and other diseases. More recently he has focussed on the way viruses adapt to the immune system of the patient and the implications of this for HIV vaccine design and other newly emerging infectious disease threats. His group also study the genetics and mechanisms by which drugs may cause severe side effects. Their discovery of a genetic test to predict those patients predisposed to develop a potentially life-threatening reaction to the important anti-HIV drug abacavir has been taken up globally and represents one of the first successful implementations of personalised medicine.
