Siddharth Dube

Siddharth Dube is a non-fiction writer and specialist commentator on poverty, public health, and development.

His books include In the Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family, 1947-1997; Sex, Lies and AIDS; and the central essay to photographer Sebastião Salgado's The End of Polio. He is currently working on a historical account of AIDS in India, to be published in 2011.

Dube was born in Calcutta in 1961. He studied at Tufts University, the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism, and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he completed his MSc in 1991. He has since been scholar-in-residence at Yale University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, and a long-term visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Currently, he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City, a contributing editor at Caravan, and a member of the advisory board of FXB India Suraksha, which works with children affected by HIV.

Dube has worked and consulted for the World Bank, UNICEF, WHO and other international organizations, most recently as senior adviser to the Executive Director of UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. In 2009, he was a member of the UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group. He has been awarded research grants by the Ford Foundation, IDRC, and the US Institute of Peace.

In 2006, Siddharth Dube, the writer Vikram Seth and the historian Saleem Kidwai initiated a campaign by eminent Indians to decriminalize same-sex relations. In 2003, Dube helped organize the first-ever conference on the UN system's responsibilities for protecting the rights of sexual minorities.

For more information, visit www.SiddharthDube.com