Vinay Saldanha

Vinay Saldanha is the Director of the U.S. Liaison Office in Washington DC. Mr Saldanha has been with UNAIDS since 2004, serving in a variety of roles, including Director of the Regional Support Team for Eastern Europe and Central Asia in Moscow, Deputy Chief of Staff in Geneva, and as Monitoring and Evaluation Adviser in Ukraine. He successfully led the development and adoption of the Global AIDS Strategy, and also played a key role supporting the negotiations of the UNGA Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS in New York. mr Saldanha also facilitated the UNAIDS Advisory Group, a critical corporate support for the transition.

Mr Saldanha has more than two decades of experience in the leadership and implementation of AIDS programmes.

In 1993, Mr Saldanha led one of the first initiatives to provide care and support for people living with HIV in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation. He was later a political analyst for the Group of Eight (G8) Research Group of the University of Toronto, focusing on the issue of HIV and the role of the Russian Federation during the G8 summit held in the United Kingdom in 1998.

From 1998 to 2004, Mr Saldanha served as the Canadian project coordinator for the Canada AIDS Russia Project (CARP), an innovative interdisciplinary effort to unite leading Russian and Canadian HIV experts at the federal and regional levels in training, research and mobilizing civil society.

Mr Saldanha graduated with honours from the University of Toronto, majoring in political science and English literature. He took postgraduate courses at the University of Toronto and the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC. He has also completed advanced training in HIV monitoring and evaluation and global health. Mr Saldanha is fluent in English and Russian.