Quarraisha Abdool Karim is the Associate Director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban and Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University. Through her ground-breaking AIDS research, advocacy and leadership, Karim has had a profound impact on HIV prevention science, policy and programmes. In addition to providing the first evidence that antiretroviral drugs prevent sexual transmission of HIV in women, she has made seminal contributions in depicting the evolving HIV epidemic over the last 25 years, quantifying its impact on young women and leading the first post-democracy government’s AIDS response in South Africa. Her global leadership in HIV prevention is illustrated by her role as the International Scientific Programme Co-chair of the XIX International AIDS Conference held in Washington in 2012 and invited plenary presentations at the XIIth and XIVth International AIDS Conferences. She is among Africa’s most cited AIDS researchers; her articles in Science, Nature, Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have impacted both local and global responses to the HIV epidemic. She is a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and a member of the Institute of Medicine. She is the recipient of the 2013 “TWAS Prize in Medical Sciences”, the 2012 Mann-N’Galy Award, Columbia University’s “Allan Rosenfield Alumni Award for Excellence”, and the 2011 DST Women in Science Award in Life Sciences and Engineering. 

Jonathan Jansen is Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State and President of the South African Institute of Race Relations. He holds a PhD from Stanford University, an MS degree from Cornell University, and honorary doctorates of education from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), Cleveland State University (USA), and the University of Vermont (USA, 2014). He is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a Fellow of TWAS. His book, Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past (Stanford 2009) was listed as one of the best books of that year by the American Libraries Association. His new book, Schools that Work, uses video-documentaries to capture what happens inside disadvantaged schools which nevertheless produce the best results in physical science and mathematics in South Africa. He also writes popular books like Great South African Teachers (with two students), We need to talk, and We need to act (2013); and is a columnist for The Times and Die Burger. In 2013, he was awarded the Education Africa Lifetime Achiever Award in New York and the Spendlove Award from the University of California for his contributions to tolerance, democracy and human rights. In May 2014, he received an honorary doctor of letters degree at the University of Vermont and recently Knowledge in the Blood also won the Nayef Al Rodhan Prize, the largest award from the British Academy for the Social Science and Humanities, for its contribution to scholarly excellence and transcultural understanding.