David Mabey is a physician specialising in Infectious and Tropical Diseases. After training in the UK, he went to work at the Medical Research Council unit in The Gambia, West Africa in 1978, and was in charge of clinical services there from 1982-86. He joined the School as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Clinical Sciences in 1986, and was made Professor of Communicable Diseases in 1994. He is an Honorary Consultant Physician at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. He was head of the Clinical Research Unit in the School from 1995-2002, and has been Director of the Wellcome Trust Bloomsbury Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/wbc/ since 1995. He was responsible for the Knowledge Programme on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections, funded at the School by the Department for International Development http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/dfid/aids from 1991-2007. He is Director of the WHO Collaborating centre for the Prevention and Control of Sexually Transmitted Infections at the School, and Chair of the Field Trials Committee of the STD Diagnostics Initiative at WHO/TDR . He is also a member of the WHO Global Alliance against trachoma, and has sat on the Trachoma Expert Committee of the International Trachoma Initiative.