Word for Word

24 May 2014

Meet the International AIDS Society’s First Gay President – Professor Chris Beyrer.

Health, News & Politics, Society & Culture

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Conférence de presse du prix Nobel Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

Chris Beyrer is Professor of Epidemiology, International Health, and Health, Behaviour, and Society at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is considered to be one of the world’s leading experts in the transference of HIV among gay men or men who have sex with men and is President Elect of the International AIDS Society (IAS).

Elected by his international peers, Chris is the first Gay man to become President of IAS, a position that begins here in Melbourne at AIDS 2014. With new infections of HIV rapidly escalating amongst gay men in the United Kingdom, USA and Australia, his appointment is timely.

Chris Beyrer MD, MPH, is the founder and director of the University’s Centre for Public Health and Human Rights, which focuses on the health and rights of communities facing stigma, discrimination, and violence, including sexual and gender minorities, people who use drugs, migrants, refugees, and civilians in conflict.

An infectious disease epidemiologist, he is also associate director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for AIDS Research and of the JHU Centre for Global Health. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and Co-Chairs the U.S. National Institutes of Health Office of AIDS Research Planning Committee on Epidemiology and Natural History. In 2012, he became President- Elect of the International AIDS Society, and will serve as President of the IAS, the world’s largest body of HIV professionals, from 2014-16. Dr. Beyrer is the author of more than 185 scientific papers, and author or editor of six books, including War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia, and Public Health and Human Rights: Evidence-Based Approaches.

He serves on the MSM Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network, and in 2012, guest-edited a special issue of The Lancet on HIV among MSM. From 1992-1997 he was based at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand, where he served as Field Director for the U.S.-Thai collaborative PAVE and HIVNET studies. He has served as a consultant and adviser to numerous national and international institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, the Open Society Foundations, The Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, Physicians for Human Rights, The Institute for Asian Democracy and Human Rights Watch.

Dr. Beyrer received a BA in History from Hobart and Wm. Smith Colleges, his MD from the State University of New York in Brooklyn, NY, and completed his residency in Preventive Medicine, public health training, an MPH and a Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He received an honorary Doctorate (PhD) in Health Sciences from Chiang Mai University in Thailand, in 2012, in recognition of his 20 years of HIV research in Thailand.