Philippa Easterbrook MD, FRCP, MPH, DTM&H

Professor Philippa Easterbrook is a Senior Scientist in the HIV department at the World Health Organisation Headquarters in Geneva, where for the last five years, she has coordinated the programmatic vision and research in the development and implementation of global guidance on the use of antiretroviral therapy in adult, pregnant women and children; management of key HIV opportunistic infections and cancers; and testing and treatment of hepatitis B and C infection. She also provides technical guidance to low and middle-income countries in the global scale-up of HIV and hepatitis testing and treatment.

She graduated with first class honors and then Distinction in Medicine from the University of Cambridge, and completed her postgraduate training in general medicine and infectious diseases in London, Oxford, and Birmingham. As a Harkness fellow at Johns Hopkins University, she trained in public health and was subsequently a Senior Lecturer in Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology at Imperial College. For eleven years, she was Head of Department, Professor of HIV Medicine, and consultant physician in Infectious Diseases at King´s College London, and served as Head of Research at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, Kampala during a one-year sabbatical.

Her research program encompasses epidemiology, clinical trials as well as collaborative pathogenesis work on the mechanisms of resistance to HIV, based on a national cohort of HIV-infected long-term non-progressors. Other research has focussed on the HIV epidemic among the African and Caribbean communities in the UK, HIV Immune Reconstitution Syndrome, and the global rollout of antiretroviral therapy. She has particular expertise in the use of clinical observational databases and is currently a co-principal investigator of several key epidemiological studies and clinical trials in sub-Saharan Africa. She also served as International Associate Director for Global Health at the UK Royal College of Physicians.