Peter Piot Biography, Career, Books, Awards and Honours

Peter Piot Biography

Peter Piot, KCMG, FRCP, FMedSci is a Belgian microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS. After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide.

Professor Peter Piot born Baron Peter Karel Piot, in 1949 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.

Peter Piot 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.

Peter Piot Career

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.

Peter Piot Books

He is the author of 17 books, including his memoir ‘No Time to Lose’ and over 550 scientific articles, and is fluent in English, French, and Dutch.

1. No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses (2012)
2. AIDS Between Science and Politics (2015)
3. AIDS as an International Political Issue: A Selection from AIDS Between Science and Politics (2014)
4. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2001)
5. Way Forward, the – Speech at the African Summit on HIV/AIDS, Tb and Other Related Infectious Diseases, 24 to 27 April 2001 Abuja, Nigeria (2001)
6. Unaids Welcomes Financial Contribution by Gates Foundation to the Global AIDS and Health Fund (2001)
7. Unaids Welcomes Financial Contribution by Winterthur Insurance to the Global AIDS and Health Fund (2001)
8. Laboratory Diagnosis of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (1999)
9. Speech at the Third United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries, Brussels, 14 – 20 May 2001
10. Address to the World Health Assembly – Geneva, 17 May 2001
11. Remarks at the Opening of the Informal Consultations on the Un General Assembly Special Session on AIDS, New York, 21 May 2001
12. Speech to the 57th Session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, 11 April 2001
13. Human Rights and HIV/AIDS (1996)
14. AIDS and Human Security – Speech at the United Nations University, Tokyo, Japan, 2 October 2001
15. AIDS and HIV Infection in the Tropics (1988)
16. Statement by Unaids Executive Director Peter Piot to the International Coordinating Committee Meeting of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, Geneva, 18-20 April 2001
17. HIV Vaccine Development: Unaids Perspectives (2009)

Peter Piot  ‘No time to lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses’

Originally published: 28 May 2012
Authors: Peter Piot, Ruth Marshall
Genres: Biography, Autobiography

When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, “There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved.” Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into the quarantine zone on the most dangerous missions, he studied local customs to determine how this disease—the Ebola virus—was spreading. Later, Piot found himself in the field again when another mysterious epidemic broke out: AIDS. He traveled throughout Africa, leading the first international AIDS initiatives there. Then, as founder and director of UNAIDS, he negotiated policies with leaders from Fidel Castro to Thabo Mbeki and helped turn the tide of the epidemic. Candid and engrossing, No Time to Lose captures the urgency and excitement of being on the front lines in the fight against today’s deadliest diseases.

Peter Piot Awards and Honours

He has received numerous scientific and civic awards:

1. Officer of the Order of the Leopard of Zaire in 1976 for his work during the Ebola outbreak
2. Ennobled as a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium, in 1995
3. Honorary doctorate from seven universities
4. Officer of the Order of the Lion of Senegal
5. Vlerick Award IN 2004
6. Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, Robert Koch Gold medal
7. Prix International INSERM, Paris (2015)
8. TIME Person of the Year, 2014 (The Ebola Fighters) and received the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health
9. Laureate of the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for Medical Research (2013)
10. Thomas Parran Award from ASTDA
11. The Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights in 2001
12. The Frank A Calderone Prize in Public Health in 2003
13. The RSTMH Manson Medal and Bloomberg Hopkins Award in 2016
14. Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the United Kingdom (2016)