DR SAANI ALIYU

Dr Sani Aliyu was appointed as the Director-General of the Nigeria National Agency for the Control of AIDS in July 2016. He graduated from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria in 1993. He has a postgraduate diploma from the Imperial College and a Master’s with distinction in Microbiology from Queen Mary University of London. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists. After completing residency training at Cambridge University Hospitals in 2007, he worked briefly as consultant microbiologist in Birmingham until 2008 when he returned to Cambridge as the first joint consultant in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology. Dr Aliyu is an associate lecturer at the University of Cambridge and until recently the chair of the U.K Infectious Diseases Specialist Certification Exam Board. Dr Aliyu was the immediate past Caldicott Guardian at Cambridge University Hospitals responsible for Information Governance.

He is a recipient of the Draper Company prize in Microbiology who has 64 peer-reviewed papers and has co-authored for book chapters on a range of topics on infectious diseases. Locally, he is a vising associate professor of Microbiology at Kaduna State University and a member of the NIMR Research Board. He is a co-investigator on several multi-centre clinical trials including PrEP Demonstration Study in Nigeria. His interests include HIV epidemiology, molecular diagnostics and antimicrobial resistance. As Head of the national HIV agency responsible for coordinating the world’s second largest HIV response, Dr Aliyu’s main priorities over the next couple of years are to establish the true prevalence of HIV in Nigeria, improve the uptake of PMTCT services and secure a sustainable, robust and cost-effective HIV response for the country.