Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, an internationally recognized epidemiologist who has worked on the front lines of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 treatment and research, became director of the Duke Global Health Institute in August 2022.

Beyrer has led collaborative research on HIV prevention and treatment in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia for more than 30 years. He is past president of the International AIDS Society, the world’s largest body of HIV professionals, and has served as advisor to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, the National Institutes of Health’s Office of AIDS Research, the World Health Organization, and numerous other agencies and institutions. He was named in 2022 to the annual list of the world’s most cited scientists, based on citation data compiled by Clarivate.

Before coming to Duke, Beyrer was the inaugural Desmond M. Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he served as associate director of the JHU Center for AIDS Research and the Center for Global Health. He was the founding director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights. He received his medical degree from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2014 and serves on the Academy’s Board for Global Health and the Committee for Human Rights.