Board
Frank de Wolf (Chairman) is a medical microbiologist, who has been involved in HIV/AIDS-related research since 1984. Since 2001, he has served as Director of the Dutch HIV Monitoring Foundation, which is responsible for the collection and analysis of data obtained from all HIV-positive individuals seen at one of the 25 national HIV treatment centres in the Netherlands.
James Nolan (Treasurer) is the Executive Vice President and Global Head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Royal Philips Electronics based in Amsterdam. He qualified as a barrister in the United Kingdom and worked in the banking industry in London and Paris prior to joining Philips. He has served on the boards of various companies, as well as being a member of their audit committees. He has been on the board of AFEW since 2004.
Leah Utyasheva (Board Member) is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, Toronto, Canada, which she joined in April 2006. In this capacity she specialises in human rights of people living with HIV, people who use drugs and prisoners in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Leah has worked in the area of human rights and law in the region of Eastern Europe and Central Asia for more than 7 years. She previously worked at the American Bar Association's Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) in Moscow and Public Interest Law Initiative (PILI) in Budapest. Born in Ufa, Russia, Leah has a law degree from the Bashkir State University. She holds an LL.M. in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University, Budapest, and a Ph.D. in Human Rights Law from the University of Newcastle, United Kingdom.
Guido van den Berk (Board Member) is an internist-infectious disease specialist who has been working in the OLVG Hospital in the centre of Amsterdam since 2006. This hospital is the biggest HIV clinic in the Netherlands with over 2,000 patients. Guido’s Outpatient Department is responsible for the care of 500 HIV patients. Guido has also worked as a doctor for Medecins Sans frontieres in Ukraine and India. He has also lived and worked in Curacao, Botswana and South Africa. He has been on the board of AFEW since 2010.
Elena Vovc (Board Member) holds a Master's degree from Boston University School of Public Health and has followed a course on Infectious Diseases in Humanitarian Emergencies in London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a course on Environmental protection/Hazards emergency planning (CAMEO) in Harvard School of Public Health. Elena coordinates HIV/AIDS, STIs and Viral Hepatitis Program at World Health Organisation (WHO) Russia. Previously she had worked at American International Health Alliance and Soros Foundation-Moldova.
Catherine Hankins (Board Member) is the Deputy Director, Science at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, University of Amsterdam, and an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health. For almost a decade she was the Chief Scientific Adviser to UNAIDS, leading its scientific knowledge translation team focused on ethical and participatory trial conduct, communication of trial results, and support to country implementation of proven biomedical HIV prevention interventions. She co-managed the WHO-UNAIDS HIV Vaccine Initiative and founded and edited the UNAIDS science blog HIV This Week. Dr. Hankins is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada and former President of the Canadian Association for HIV Research.
Management Team
Anke van Dam (Executive Director since February 2012), born in 1958 in the Netherlands, graduated from Erasmus University in Rotterdam as a medical doctor in 1983, received a specialist degree as a general practitioner from Rijksuniversiteit in Leiden in 1985, and graduated as a community health specialist from the Netherlands School of Public and Occupational Health in Utrecht in 1998. She began her career as a general practitioner near Rotterdam, providing care to many immigrants from Turkey and Morocco. She then moved from the clinical setting and began working on issues related to sexual health and HIV as a trainer, an advisor and a consultant, including proposal writing and programme evaluation. Before joining AFEW, she held a senior management position at Rutgers Nisso Groep, the Dutch Expert Centre on Sexuality. In addition to this breadth of knowledge, Anke’s work experience spans the globe from Southeast Asia and Africa to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She joined AFEW as Director of Programmes in January 2008.
Elena Agapova (Director of Finance and Administration) joined AFEW in 2004. She has more than 10 years of experience working in various senior-level finance positions. Before joining AFEW, she worked as a financial consultant to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in New York. Elena has also worked as a Director of Finance at several USAID-funded projects in Moscow, including the Institute for Election Systems Development (IESD), and the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES). In addition, she led the Finance Department at the real estate firm, Perestroika. Elena is a certified management accountant, and a member of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Elena obtained her Master of Science degree in Management from New York University, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Services, specializing in finance and accounting. She was an Edmund F. Muskie fellow, funded by the US State Department. Elena also holds a Master's degree in Economics from Lomonosov Moscow State University.