Peter Piot

Education and career

Piot was born in Leuven, Belgium. He studied medicine at Ghent University, and earned an M.D. in 1974. He then began working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp while pursuing a graduate degree in clinical microbiology from the University of Antwerp. He received a PhD in microbiology from the University of Antwerp in 1980.

In 1976, while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was part of a team that discovered the Ebola virus in a sample of blood taken from a sick nun working in Zaire. Piot and his colleagues subsequently traveled to Zaire to help quell the outbreak. Piot's team made key discoveries into how the virus spread, and traveled from village to village, spreading information and putting the ill and those who had come into contact with them into quarantine. The epidemic was stopped in three months, after it had killed almost 300 people. The events were dramatised by Mike Walker on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 in a production by David Morley. Dr Piot narrated the programme.

In the 1980s, Dr. Piot participated in a series of collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania and Zaire. Project SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire was the first international project on AIDS in Africa and is widely acknowledged as having provided the foundations of science's understanding of HIV infection in Africa. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, and at the University of Nairobi, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Lausanne, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He was also a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, a Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

From 1991 to 1994, Dr. Piot was president of the International AIDS Society. In 1992, he became Assistant Director of the World Health Organization's Global Programme on HIV/AIDS. On 12 December 1994, he was appointed Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

In 2009-2010, he served as director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College London. In September 2010, he became the director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He is the author of 16 books and over 550 scientific articles, and is fluent in English, French, and Dutch.

In 2014, in the face of an unprecedented Ebola epidemic in western Africa, Piot and other scientists called for the emergency release of the experimental ZMapp vaccine for use on humans before it had undergone clinical testing on humans. He chaired an independent panel convened by Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine into the national and international response to the epidemic, which sharply criticised the response of the World Health Organization and put forward ten recommendations for the body's reorganisation.

Awards and honours

Dr. Piot was appointed an Officer of the Order of the Leopard of Zaire in 1976 for his work during the Ebola outbreak, and was also appointed an Officer of the Order of the Lion of Senegal. He was ennobled as a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium, in 1995. In 2004, he was awarded the Vlerick Award and in 2013 he was awarded the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize. In 2016 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the United Kingdom.