Biographies of Press Teleconference Speakers

Stephen Lewis

Formerly the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis is co-Director of AIDS-Free World, a new international AIDS advocacy organization, based in the United States. He is also the chairman of the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation and Professor in Global Health in the Faculty of Social Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. TIME magazine named Lewis one of the “100 most influential people in the world” in 2005. His best-selling book, Race Against Time, was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Award and the Trillium Book Award. It won the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Libris Award for non-fiction book of the year, and Lewis was named the CBA’s Author of the Year for 2005.

Paul Farmer

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Farmer is also a professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His work draws primarily on active clinical practice (he is an attending physician in infectious diseases and Associate Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and medical director of a charity hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti) and focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. Along with his colleagues at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and in Haiti, Peru, Russia, and Rwanda, Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis (including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis). Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings.

Nesri Padayatchi

Nesri Padayatchi, MD, is the CDC (Durban), Site Manager for the START project of CAPRISA. She has 18 years of clinical and research experience in the management of tuberculosis and related problems. She was the manager of the Provincial Tuberculosis Referral Hospital for 14 years. She was also the acting Director of the Medical Research Council's Tuberculosis Lead Program from 1999 to 2003. She has been a recipient of the Columbia University-South Africa Fogarty AIRTP fellowship and has completed her MS in epidemiology from Columbia University.

Gregg Gonsalves

Gregg Gonsalves is the HIV/TB Coordinator for ARASA, the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. Through his program at ARASA, Gonsalves works to strengthen and support the empowerment of people living with HIV/AIDS and their communities and to build a cadre of knowledgeable leaders across the region as the basis of a broad social mobilization around the right to health. Prior to joining ARASA, he was the Director of Treatment and Prevention Advocacy at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York and a Policy Director for the Treatment Action Group (TAG). Gonsalves has worked on behalf of people with HIV since 1990, first as a member of ACT UP/Boston and then ACT UP/NY. He founded TAG in 1992 with a dozen other former members of the Treatment and Data Committee of ACT UP/NY.