A WHO Public Health Approach to Ending AIDS in the Global South

Charles F. Gilks holds the inaugural Queensland Professorial Chair in Blood-borne Viruses and STIs at the University of Queensland (UQ). He is a global health specialist and clinical academic. A UK graduate, he started working on HIV/AIDS in East Africa in 1988, based in Nairobi at the Kenya Medical Research Institute. He became the Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1994 before moving to WHO in 2001 to head up HIV treatment and prevention scale-up and to drive "3by5" roll out. He was appointed UNAIDS Country Coordinator in India in 2009 and moved to Australia in 2013 to become Dean and Head of the School of Public Health at UQ.

Yibeltal Assefa Alemu is an Associate Professor in Global Health Systems at the School of Public Health, the University of Queensland. He has played key roles in developing national and global guidelines and contributed to health systems strengthening and universal health coverage in Ethiopia and other resource-limited settings. He has held influential positions in Ethiopia, including Deputy Director General of the Ethiopian Public Health Institute, Executive Director of the International Institute for Primary Health Care, Director of Medical Services at the Federal Ministry of Health, Director of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation as well as Head of Health Programs at the Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office.