Projects and initiatives

Professor Robert Power is Principal for Disease Prevention at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He is also a Professor in the School of Population Health, University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Professor at Monash University. He has worked in the field of HIV prevention since 1985, with several posts within Medical Schools in the University of London. His main focus has been on community-level interventions for injecting drug use and in reducing the spread of HIV infection. He has consulted for a range of bilaterals and multilaterals in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, South-East Asia and China and was instrumental in developing rapid assessment methodologies, completing such studies in countries as diverse as Croatia and Egypt, the Czech Republic and Vietnam. He is currently Technical Director of the British Department for International Development’s Central Asia Regional HIV/AIDS Project and also of AusAID’s bilateral in Indonesia. Other areas of his work have included: the broad empirical and theoretical aspects of harm reduction; service delivery and screening for tuberculosis; marginalized populations; ethnography; the relationship between the treatment of illicit drug use and harm reduction; and the management and psycho-social implications of HIV anti-retroviral therapy. He is currently leading Burnet’s Aboriginal Health Initiative.