Peter Sands

Peter Sands became Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in March 2018.

Sands joined the Global Fund after a distinguished career in banking, most notably as Chief Executive Officer of Standard Chartered PLC from 2006 to 2015. Under his direction, Standard Chartered focused its corporate responsibility initiatives on health issues, including avoidable blindness, AIDS and malaria. During this time, Sands served on the board of the Global Business Coalition on AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and was lead non-executive director on the board of the United Kingdom’s Department of Health.

After stepping down from Standard Chartered in 2015, Sands became a research fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School, where he worked on a range of projects at the interface of global health and international finance, publishing papers in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. In 2015-16, Sands was chair of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine’s Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future, which published the influential report “The Neglected Dimension of Global Security: a Framework to Counter Infectious Disease Threats” in January 2016. In 2016-2017, he chaired the International Working Group on Financing Pandemic Preparedness at the World Bank. Sands, who remains affiliated with Harvard, is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science’s Forum on Microbial Threats.

Sands has served on numerous boards and commissions, including as a governor of the UK’s National Institute for Economic and Social Research, a member of the International Advisory Board of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, a board director of the Institute of International Finance, and a director of the World Economic Forum.

Sands was educated in the UK, Canada and the U.S. He graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford University with a First-Class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He also received a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University, where he was a Harkness Fellow.