After he qualified as a Doctor of Medicine at the University of Ghent (Belgium) in 1974, he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire in 1976. In 1980 Peter Piot received a PhD degree in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He was also a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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 our 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 the Universities of Nairobi, Brussels, and Lausanne.

From 1991 to 1994, Dr. Piot was president of the International AIDS Society. 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.

Dr. Piot was ennobled a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium, in 1995. 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, and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK. He is fluent in three languages and is the author of 16 books and more than 500 scientific articles.

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