Biosketch Dr Alex G Coutinho MD, MSc, MPH, DTM&H, FRCP, PhD

Dr Alex Coutinho is a Global Health leader who has practiced medicine and public health in Africa for the past 40 years. He has been involved with the HIV/AIDS epidemic since 1982 when the first cases emerged in Uganda and over the years has provided care and treatment services directly to HIV+ people as a physician as well as designed and led large scale HIV prevention, care and treatment programs in Swaziland, Uganda and Rwanda. He was the Executive Director of TASO – The AIDS Support Organization – from 2001 to 2007, where he built on the work of his predecessors to scale up care and treatment services to over 100,000 HIV+ in Uganda. From 2007 till 2014 he was the Executive Director of the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere University, Kampala where he led teams that scaled up HIV care and treatment access to 105,000 HIV+ in 8 districts in Uganda as well as established a male circumcision program for 140,000 young men over a 36-month period. In addition, between 2013-2018, IDI led the Saving Mothers Giving Life initiative to a population of 800,000 in Western Uganda and the intervention was able to reduce maternal mortality by 41% over 36 months and >50% over 60 months of intervention. He served as Chair of the Board of the International Partnership for Microbicides (IPM) based in Washington DC and as the Chair of the Board for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) based in New York.

Dr Coutinho served on the interim board of the Global Fund in 2001 and served as Vice Chair of the TRP of the Global Fund 2002-2005. In 2013 he was awarded the prestigious Hideyo Noguchi Africa prize by the Japanese Government together with Dr. Peter Piot, recognizing his contribution to global health through scale up of innovative health approaches to tackle HIV/AIDS in Africa.

His passion is Global Health as well as leadership development and mentoring. He is an articulate and compelling public speaker who has addressed many large-scale global health meetings with key note addresses and presentations and is able to communicate complex issues in an accurate but easy to understand narrative to varying audiences.

His current work is with the Gates Foundation to support development of Leadership Management and Governance skills in malaria program staff across Africa. Dr Coutinho is also consulting for Africa CDC as the program lead for the Kofi Annan Global Health Leadership Program.