Professor Michel Kazatchkine is UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Kazatchkine has spent the past 25 years fighting AIDS and working to improve global health as a leading physician, researcher, advocate, policymaker, diplomat and administrator.

He attended medical school at Necker-Enfants-Malades in Paris, studied immunology at the Pasteur Institute and completed postdoctoral fellowships at St Mary’s hospital in London and Harvard Medical School.

His involvement with HIV began in 1983, when as a young clinical immunologist he treated a French couple who had returned from Africa with unexplained fever and severe immune deficiency. By 1985, he had started a clinic in Paris specialising in AIDS, which now treats over 1,600 people.

From 1998 to 2005, Professor Kazatchkine directed the French National Research Agency (ANRS), the world’s second largest AIDS research programme. He has produced more than 600 research papers focusing on auto-immunity, drug therapy, immuno-intervention and HIV pathogenesis, in addition to serving on numerous editorial boards.

From 2005 to 2007, Professor Kazatchkine was France’s global ambassador for HIV/AIDS and transmissible diseases. As Ambassador he championed France’s contributions to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and the establishment of Unitaid.

In 2007 he was elected as Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. In his five years at the helm of the Fund, more than $20 billion in additional donor commitments and pledges were mobilised and he oversaw a major expansion of the Global Fund’s operations and grant portfolio, establishing the Fund as the major international financer of health programs. He strongly emphasised the Fund’s role as a model partnership for development at the national and global levels and promoted innovative approaches to health financing, including Debt2Health and the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria. His leadership of the Global Fund consolidated his reputation as one of the world’s leading advocates for health and human rights.

In 2012, Professor Kazatchkine was appointed as the UN Secretary General‘s Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the part of the world where the AIDS epidemic is expanding at the fastest rate.

Sir Harry Burns is Professor of Global Public Health, at the University of Strathclyde, and formerly Chief Medical Officer for Scotland.

He began his career in general surgery, and for five years he was a consultant surgeon at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and subsequently became its Medical Director. Sir Harry completed a Masters Degree in Public Health in 1990 and, in 1993, became Director of Public Health for Greater Glasgow. In September 2005 he was appointed Chief Medical Officer for Scotland. His legacy in this post includes his ground-breaking work on the importance of the early years as the basis for health and wellbeing in adulthood, along with tackling issues of health and social inequality. In April 2014 Sir Harry stood down to take up his current role as Professor of Global Public Health at Strathclyde University. In December that year he was also presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the first Scottish Public Service Awards, recognising his lasting contribution to public service in Scotland.

Dave is a qualified Mental Health Nurse, qualifying in 1999 from the University of Central Lancashire. Prior to that he had had various roles in acute psychiatric intensive care units. Following several years working in forensic mental health he began to specialise in substance misuse and the crossover between Mental Health, Substance Misuse and Criminal Justice, including running Drug Rehabilitation Requirements in Blackpool as part of the well regarded Tower Project.

In 2014 he embarked on a secondment with Combat Stress, a veterans’ mental health charity, to pilot a service to enable and encourage veterans with military- related PTSD and substance misuse issues to access the services they need, in order to address these complex issues: issues that neither drug services, criminal justice services, nor mainstream mental health services alone were able to address.

Before long it became clear that there were many veterans becoming lost in the criminal justice system due to undiagnosed PTSD, complicated by substance misuse, and that their substance misuse was preventing them from accessing quality treatment for their PTSD issues. Veterans are the single largest professional group involved with the criminal justice system. The project that Dave has been key in developing aims to target veterans who may have been misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed, in order to ensure that they receive the treatment they deserve (prevention) or the diagnosis they need (diversion) in order they receive optimum care packages.

He was given this year’s the Paolo Pertica award for his innovative approach in developing care pathways, which led to swifter diagnosis of PTSD, allowing a more effective multi-agency response for those in need of help.