Richard Skolnik, MPA - Director of International Programs, The Population Reference Bureau, Washington, D.C.

Richard Skolnik is the director of International Programs at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C. and has worked more than 30 years in education, health, and development.

Mr. Skolnik is the former executive director of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief at the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to that post, he was at the George Washington University, where he was the Director of the Center for Global Health, taught an undergraduate course on global health for seven semesters, and supervised the Master of Public Health degree projects each semester.

From 1976 to 2001, Mr. Skolnik worked at the World Bank and during his last fifteen years there, he managed important components of the Bank’s health and education portfolios. He has extensive experience in basic education, nutrition, reproductive health, child health, infectious disease control, and health systems development. He has been involved in country level work in these areas in Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Mr. Skolnik has also participated extensively in policy-making and program development at the international level. He was deeply involved in the establishment of the STOP TB program and served three rounds on the Technical Review Panel of the Global Fund to Fight Against AIDS, TB, and Malaria. He led independent evaluations of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and of the Global Alliance for the Elimination of Leprosy. He has also served on WHO working and advisory groups on DOTS expansion, TB/HIV co-infection, public and private partnerships for TB control, and follow-up to the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.

Mr. Skolnik received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and a Master of Public Affairs degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. At Yale, he participated in the Five Year BA Program and spent one year teaching high school science in Laoag City in the Philippines, living with the same family with which he had earlier lived as a high school exchange student. Upon graduation from Yale, he was selected for a fellowship from the Yale-China Association and spent two years teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In between his two years at the Woodrow Wilson School, Mr. Skolnik was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and, as part of that activity, published a monograph on education and training in Singapore.

Mr. Skolnik has studied and learned to varying degrees French, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Ilocano, and Tagalog.