Parlimentary Conference Speaker: Zessler – bio

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Dr Laurent Zessler

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Director and Representative for UNFPA’s Pacific Sub-Regional Office, Fiji

Dr Laurent Zessler, UNFPA’s Director and Representative for UNFPA’s Pacific Sub-Regional Office, is based in Fiji.

Dr Zessler, a national of France, was appointed to UNFPA’s sub-regional office in November 2013.

Previously he was in Afghanistan for some three years as UNFPA’s Country Representative. He joined UNFPA in 2011 from UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, where he had served as Senior Regional Advisor for West and Central Africa. He also was country director for Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Vietnam, Pakistan and Ecuador, between 1996 and 2011.

In 1995, Dr Zessler served as the AIDS/STI (sexually transmitted infections) Intercountry Advisor for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Pakistan; until then he had served as the AIDS/STI Intercountry Advisor for PAHO (Pan American Health Organization)/WHO from 1989 in Ecuador, Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and in Washington DC.

Dr Zessler has also worked as an Associate with the Pasteur Institute in France and as a medical officer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sudan.

He holds a Doctorate in Medicine from the Paris School of Medicine, Université René Descartes, a Masters in Public Health from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and held a Fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the School of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University.