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.
