INVITED SPEAKERS

Professor Kerry Arabena
A descendant of the Meriam people of the Torres Strait, Professor Kerry Arabena's years of work have brought her to the forefront of Indigenous affairs in Australia. A former social worker with a Doctorate in Human Ecology, Kerry is the Chair for Indigenous Health and Director of Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. Prior to taking up this position in January 2013, she was the Director of Indigenous Health Research, School for Indigenous Health, Monash University. With an extensive background in public health, administration, community development and research, working in senior roles in Indigenous policy and sexual health she is now Chair of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Equity Council and a Director of Indigenous Community Volunteers. Her work has made significant nationally and internationally in areas such as gender issues, social justice, human rights, access and equity, service provision, harm minimisation, and citizenship rights and responsibilities.

Kerry was the inaugural Chair of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, a national Indigenous representative body established in 2010. Kerry has also represented Australia in international forums on HIV/AIDS, and climate change. Her professional experience has seen her recognised as an Australian of the Year Finalist in 2010, recipient of the prestigious JG Crawford Prize for Academic Excellence at Australian National University in 2011, and a nomination in The bulletin magazine's 'Smart 100 Australians' - Health and Medical Research Category, in 2004.


Dr George Ayala, PsyD, is the Executive Director of the Global Forum on MSM and HIV (MSMGF) where he leads the agency’s international policy, advocacy, research, and technical support responses to HIV among gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM). Dr. Ayala has worked in the non-profit HIV/AIDS sector managing multi-million dollar budgets and supervising large, interdisciplinary teams of professionals for over 20 years. A clinical psychologist by training, Dr. Ayala has conducted HIV social science and intervention research since 1996.  His research has mainly focused on understanding the mechanisms through which social discrimination affects the risk for HIV among gay men of color in the U.S.  He has more recently explored the facilitators and barriers to HIV-related services through his international cross-sectional online survey research with gay men/MSM.


Ambassador Mark Dybul became Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria on 21 January 2013. A passionate advocate of global health, Dybul believes that by working with partners, we can defeat AIDS, TB and malaria in the next ten years. As an immunologist, as an administrator, as a teacher and as a leader, Dybul has worked for more than 25 years to help prevent and treat infectious diseases, especially among people most in need.

After graduating from Georgetown Medical School in Washington D.C., Dybul joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dybul became a founding architect and driving force in the formation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR, a special vehicle for addressing the AIDS emergency in countries where treatment was largely unavailable ten years ago. He led efforts to expand PEPFAR’s reach and helped dramatically increase accessibility and lower the costs of treatment and prevention of HIV and AIDS. In 2006, Dybul was formally appointed as its leader, becoming U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, with the rank of Ambassador. He served until 2009.

Before coming to the Global Fund, Dybul was co-director of the Global Health Law Program at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, where he was also a Distinguished Scholar. Dybul has written extensively in scientific and policy literature, and has received several Honorary Degrees, including an Honorary Doctorate from Georgetown University.

Professor Robert J Wilkinson is a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Clinical Science and an MRC Programme Leader at Imperial College London and the UK’s National Institute for Medical Research seconded to the University of Cape Town where he directs that University’s Clinical Infectious Diseases Research Initiative (www.cidri.uct.ac.za). He is a Physician Scientist with a long-standing interest in the Immunology of HIV-associated TB. Wilkinson has co-authored 183 articles and reviews on Infectious Diseases with emphasis on TB.

Following early Infectious Diseases research with Medécins Sans Frontières in south Sudan working on trials of drug therapy for visceral leishmaniasis, Wilkinson has worked in the UK, as well as for a period at Case Western Reserve University, USA, on various aspects of human TB. This has included research on epitope specific T cell responses in TB, proof of concept research into peptide based immunodiagnosis of TB, the association between vitamin D deficiency and TB, regulation of TB genes within primary human cells, investigations of phenotype to genotype relationships, and the effect of treatment on the T cell response in latent TB.

Wilkinson moved to Cape Town in 2004, where his work has been more clinically oriented to the pressing problem of HIV-associated TB. Over the last seven years his group has contributed to the description of a transcriptomic signature of active TB and studies of interferon gamma release assays. They have investigated the effects and mechanisms of preventive therapies (antiretroviral therapy, isoniazid and vitamin D). They have determined that protective antiretroviral-mediated immune recovery in HIV-TB is associated with expansion of central memory T cells rather than the commonly determined effector response. Conversely, pathological immune restoration, as exemplified by the HIV-TB immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome, is contributed to by dysregulated Th1 expansions and by exaggerated cytokine release. They have determined by clinical trials that the steroid hormone vitamin D augments protective immunity to TB and that corticosteroids help suppress pathological immunity via downregulation of IL-6 and TNF. They have documented that severe vitamin D deficiency is highly prevalent amongst black Africans and associated with HIV-TB. The group has recently shown isoniazid preventive therapy reduces the risk of tuberculosis by 37% in HIV infected persons prescribed antiretrovirals for the prevention of TB. They have also enrolled 273 HIV infected persons to an ongoing phase IIB trial of a novel TB vaccine.

Dr Evy Yunihastuti
Evy Yunihastuti is the medical coordinator of the Pokdisus HIV Clinic at Cipto Mangunkusomo Hospital, affiliated with University of Indonesia in Jakarta. The clinic cares for over 6000 HIV patients offering counselling, multidisciplinary care and follow up. The high frequency of co-infections (commonly Hepatitis B, hepatitis C (HCV) and/or tuberculosis) and the young patient population carries many lessons for other clinics in South East Asia. Evy is coordinating several research projects following these co-infections, consequences of antiretroviral therapy and issues around treatment access for minority groups, including IDU and MSM. Her PhD addressed patients beginning ART with HCV co-infection.

 

 

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