Dr Peter Piot is Director of Imperial College London's Global Health Institute, which is focused on finding far-reaching solutions to health problems affecting populations worldwide.

Previously Dr Piot was the Executive Director of UNAIDS since its creation in 1995 and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. Dr Piot gained a medical degree from the University of Ghent, a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and was a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduating from medical school, Dr Piot co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976. Dr Piot has had a distinguished academic and scientific career having authored 16 books, more than 500 scientific articles and having received numerous awards for scientific and societal achievement.

In the 1980s Dr Piot instigated and expanded a series of collaborative projects in Africa, 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 our understanding of HIV infection in Africa. Dr Piot has also held the positions of professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, and the Universities of Nairobi, Brussels and Lausanne.

In 1992, Dr Piot joined the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization, in Geneva, as Associate Director. Dr Piot 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, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK. In 1995 Dr Piot was knighted as a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium in 1995.