Charles Gilks is an international public health specialist and clinical academic; he holds the Queensland Professorial Chair in BBVs and STIs. A UK graduate, he started working on care, support and treatment of HIV and AIDS in 1988 in East Africa, based at the Kenya Medical Research Institute, Nairobi. He became the Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1994. Charles headed up treatment and prevention scale-up at the World Health Organization from 2001 and then moved on to be UNAIDS Country Coordinator in India in 2009. He moved to Australia to be Dean and Head of the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland in 2013. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers on HIV and AIDS, and his Google H index is 74.