Dr. Stefano Bertozzi is joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation next week as its new HIV director in the global health program.

An expert in health economics, he will manage grants in HIV vaccine development, biomedical prevention research, diagnostics, development and resistance monitoring, and strategies for introduction and scaling-up of interventions, the foundation said.

HIV is one of the biggest programs at the foundation, which has spent nearly $12 billion on global health since 1994.

For the past 11 years Bertozzi has worked in the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Mexico as the director of its Center for Evaluation Research & Surveys, where he leads economics and statistics teams that conduct impact evaluations of large health and social programs.

He also chairs the Steering Committee of aids2031, an international consortium of people from diverse backgrounds looking for new ideas for the global response against HIV/AIDS. I found this video of him in which he talked about the need for a new approach to HIV that is longer term, and building more efficient management systems.

"We've been so caught up in the urgency of people dying that we haven't thought about how to win this fight over the long term," he said.... "It's foolish for us to take an emergency response to prevention."

Bertozzi co-authored this paper that discusses the spread of HIV from sex workers whose clients are willing to pay more not to have to use a condom.

"His intimate knowledge of the medicine, science, economics and policy of HIV will help make this important portfolio have the most impact," said Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's global health program. Bertozzi worked with the foundation in his previous roles at UNAIDS, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.