Fact Sheet
AIDS-FREE WORLD
Biographies of Available Spokespeople
Stephen Lewis
Co-Director, AIDS-Free World and former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
Stephen Lewis was appointed Canadian Ambassador to the UN in 1984, the first of his
several senior United Nations roles spanning two decades. Among those, he chaired the
Committee that drafted the first UN Programme on African Economic Recovery and the
first International Conference on Climate Change, coordinated an international study on
the "Consequences of Armed Conflict on Children" and was appointed by the
Organization of African Unity to its “Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the
Genocide in Rwanda”. From 1995 to 1999, Stephen was Deputy Executive Director of
UNICEF and in 2001, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named him the first Special
Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, a position he held through 2006.
Along with co-directing AIDS-Free World, Stephen is also currently a Professor in Global
Health at McMaster University and the chair of the board of the Stephen Lewis
Foundation in Canada. He is co-chair of the Leadership Programme Committee for the
XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, and serves on the Board of Directors
for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.
Among many honors and distinguished awards, Stephen has been named a Companion
of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor for lifetime achievement, and
awarded 28 honorary degrees from Canadian universities. In 2005, TIME Magazine
listed him among the World’s 100 Most Influential People, and in 2007, the Kingdom of
Lesotho invested Stephen with that southern African country’s highest honor, Knight
Commander of the Most Dignified Order of Moshoeshoe.
Paula Donovan
Co-Director, AIDS-Free World
Paula Donovan began working in international relations 20 years ago at the US Fund for
UNICEF, where she was Director of Communications. She subsequently joined
UNICEF's international headquarters as Manager of Communications and advocacy for
a joint UNICEF/World Health Organization global campaign to end the illegal promotion
of infant formula and protect women’s rights to breastfeed. Paula's next position was as
Executive Aide to the Deputy Executive Director responsible for UNICEF’s worldwide
programmes and external relations. In 2000, she was posted to Nairobi, first to create
the post of UNICEF Regional Advisor on HIV/AIDS for the 23 countries of east and
southern Africa, and then as UNIFEM's Africa-wide Gender and AIDS Advisor. In 2003,
Paula conceived of and independently organized the "International Women's AIDS Run"
in Kenya, Africa 's first all-women's long-distance road race — now an annual event —
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designed to raise awareness of the millions of women who care for those sick or
orphaned by AIDS. Prior to co-founding AIDS-Free World, she was Senior Advisor in the
Office of the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa through December 2006. Paula
holds an MA in Corporate and Political Communication from Fairfield University.
Julia Greenberg
Associate Director, AIDS-Free World
Julia Greenberg has been working on HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Community
Development for over a decade. As the Director of the Grants Department at American
Jewish World Service (AJWS), she advocated for increased direct financial support for
activists making change at the grassroots level, and developed a program that provided
over $13 million in small grants to 350 community organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin
America. In her role as Senior Program Officer for Africa, Julia spent five years traveling
extensively in the region working with women’s and PWLHA groups to develop AJWS’
HIV/AIDS program. Under her direction, AJWS provided seed funding to organizations
that went on to become key players in the global HIV/AIDS treatment access movement.
Julia served on the steering committee of the International Human Rights Funders
Group, and has spoken extensively about community responses to HIV at international
conferences including the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto and the Time
Global Health Summit. She studied Russian Literature and History at Wesleyan
University and the Institute of Steel and Alloys in Moscow.
Linda Carrier-Walker
Treasurer and Advisory Board Member, AIDS-Free World
Linda Carrier-Walker is the Director of Development and External Relations for
International Council of Nurses (ICN), a federation of more than 129 national nurses'
associations representing the 13 million nurses working worldwide, with headquarters in
Geneva. Ms. Carrier-Walker oversees the ICN’s development, external relations,
corporate communications and advocacy initiatives with members and a wide variety of
NGO, UN and corporate partners, and she has coordinated international health for
development projects in collaboration with a range of stakeholders in the public and
private sector. She has firsthand familiarity with Africa, its governance and structures
and with mechanisms for supporting grassroots and community-based organizations,
and has overseen the establishment of Wellness Centres for health sector workers in
Swaziland and Lesotho, with Malawi and Zambia in prospect. Ms. Carrier-Walker is also
the General Manager of the World Health Professions Alliance secretariat, bringing
together the International Council of Nurses, the World Medical Association, the
International Pharmacists Federation and the World Dental Federation. She has served
on the Board of Directors of the International Children’s Institute, the Canadian
Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR Quebec) and the Centre d'Action SIDA
Montréal (Femmes). She has worked as a journalist for several Canadian media outlets,
as faculty at the Carleton University School of Journalism and as a senior
communications advisor for a global communications company.
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Noah Novogrodsky
Legal Director, AIDS-Free World
Noah Novogrodsky, AIDS-Free World’s Legal Director, was most recently a Visiting
Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the Director of the University
of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. He joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto in
2002 and in September 2003 he founded and became director of the school’s
International Human Rights Program, Canada's first. The clinic has actively litigated
cases in Belize, Singapore, Sierra Leone, Uganda and before the European Court of
Human Rights; it recently contributed to decisive victories at the Canadian Supreme
Court and in a private prosecution in Cambodia.
Since 2005, Professor Novogrodsky has taught a seminar entitled “The HIV/AIDS in
Africa Project” in connection with the work of Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan, CoDirectors of AIDS-Free World. He has also been an organizer of the University of
Toronto-based Access to Drugs Initiative. Noah earned his law degree at Yale University
Law School, where he presently teaches part-time. Noah’s current research agenda
focuses on the HIV/AIDS pandemic as a threat to human security.
Shonali Shome
Kroll Human Rights Fellow, AIDS-Free World
Shonali Shome, a 2007 graduate of Georgetown Law School, has been named this
year’s Human Rights Fellow by the Kroll Family Foundation, an honor that will allow her
to apply her commitment to AIDS, her professional experience in women’s rights and her
interest in disability rights to a legal research project in Uganda for AIDS-Free World.
After earning a BA from the University of Virginia, Shonali held positions as
Development Associate at the Global Fund for Women, as a legal intern and a legal
clinic advocate for three Washington, DC-area organizations — Tahirih Justice Center,
Global Rights and the Center for Applied Legal Studies — and as a student organizer
with Medical Students for Choice and the Feminist Majority Foundation, in addition to
various voluntary board memberships and national advisory committee positions for
women’s rights organizations. In 2006, she was awarded the Judith Stronach Women’s
Rights Fellowship at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Shonali’s work as the
Kroll Human Rights Fellow is jointly hosted by AIDS-Free World and the Global Fund for
Women in San Francisco.
Myroslava Tataryn
Advisor on Disability and AIDS, AIDS-Free World
Myroslava Tataryn’s social justice activism at local, national and international levels
began in high school, and has included work with Environment Canada, the Sierra Club
and Disabled Peoples’ International. Since receiving her BA in Development and
Environmental Studies from Queen’s University in 2004, Ms. Tataryn has been active in
promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities in worldwide HIV/AIDS advocacy
efforts — an issue to which she was drawn through her personal experience with
disability and her work with disabled peoples’ organizations in Canada, Ghana, Ukraine
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and South Africa.
Ms. Tataryn was instrumental in the development of both a national education strategy
and a training manual on disability and HIV/AIDS for Disabled Peoples South Africa. She
has spoken about building alliances between the AIDS and disability rights movements
at several international gatherings, including the XVI International AIDS Conference in
Toronto in 2006. She has published “Attitudes That Don’t Work: Women with Disabilities
and Employment” in Women and Environments International Magazine (2005) and “A
youth perspective on the 6th Session of the Ad Hoc Committee for an International
Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities” in
Disability International (2005).
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AIDS-Free World is an international advocacy organization committed to speaking up
with and for people affected by AIDS, and speaking out for more urgent and more
effective global action in response to the crisis.
www.aids-freeworld.org