On Monday, Michel Sidibe of Mali was named the new executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Sidibe has served since 2007 as deputy to Peter Piot, who has helmed the U.N. agency since 1995, when it was established. A U.N. biography states that Sidibe launched his public-health career by working with Mali's nomadic Tuareg people. The United Nations Children's Fund recruited him in 1987 and dispatched him to Zaire, where he managed an immunization program for 30 million people. Prior to joining UNAIDS in 2001, he also worked in Swaziland, Burundi, and Uganda. In June, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon praised Sidibe as a "tireless leader who has been at the vanguard of the response to AIDS since the earliest days of the epidemic."

[Source: CDC National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention | Reuters | December 1, 2008 | Patrick Worsnip]