Elizabeth Pisani

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist who has spent over a decade working on the defining epidemic of our age's HIV. She has done research and worked as an adviser for the Ministries of Health of China, Indonesia, East Timor and the Philippines, and has also provided analysis and policy advice to UNAIDS, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, US Centres for Disease Control and many others. She is especially interested in trying to ensure that HIV prevention programs are guided by sensible analysis of high quality information. In 2010, she founded run Ternyata Ltd., a small public health consultancy which works mostly for the World Health Organization, the World Bank and other global health institutions. Pisani also initiates grant-funded research, which she implements in partnership with universities including Imperial College London, The George Institute of Global Health, Oxford University, and Universitas Pancasila.

In a previous existence, Pisani was a foreign correspondent for Reuters, The Economist and the Bangkok-based Asia Times, posted in Hong Kong, New Delhi, Jakarta, Hanoi and Brussels. She covered everything from conflicts (Tiananmen Square, the Aceh civil war) to markets (Asian stocks, currencies and commodities, EU trade policy). One of her first features for Reuters tracked the effect of the 1986 stock market crash on the fortunes of night-club hostesses in Hong Kong.

Her education was somewhat scattered, but she ended up with an MA in Classical Chinese from Oxford, an MSc in Medical Demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, also from London

Pisani uses unconventional field research to understand how real-world behaviors influence AIDS transmission -- and to overhaul antiquated, ineffective prevention strategies.

Pisani is fearlessly outspoken on the global failure to understand and manage the realities of AIDS, decrying the tangled roles that money, votes, and media play in the public health landscape. She shows how politics and "morality" have hogtied funding, and advocates for putting dollars where they can actually make a difference. As the Globe and Mail wrote: Pisani is lucid, colourful, insightful and impatient.

In 2008, Pisani published a book titled The Wisdom of Whores, which focuses on the ineffective programs that are in place to prevent the HIV disease. Shes also written several research papers, including the first biennial global report on AIDS for the United Nations. The Elizabeth Pisani keynotes provide eye-opening insights.