Writers
Andrew Wilson
Jim Boothroyd
Siegrid Tautz
Sue Armstrong
Stuart Adams
Karen Birdsall
Andrew Wilson is a writer and editor specializing in public health and development matters. He was born in Vancouver, and studied at the universities of Ottawa and Victoria. In the 1980s he worked in Geneva for an international trade union and in Central America with an education NGO. More recently, he
has worked for UN organizations such as UNAIDS, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. He currently lives in England where, along with freelance writing, editing and translating, he is a magistrate.
Jim Boothroyd holds degrees in History (B.A., Simon Fraser University, Vancouver), Latin American Studies (M.Phil, Cambridge) and International Journalism (M.A., City University of London). He began his career has as a journalist in London, Montreal and Vancouver and then served as Communications Coordinator (1999-2001) for Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now Ecojustice Canada) and as Communications Manager for the CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network (2001-2005), where he helped lead a national coalition that successfully lobbied to double the funding of the federal AIDS strategy. He also worked as a writer in the HIV/AIDS Department of the World Health Organization (Geneva, 2005-2006), and as a Vancouver-based communications consultant (2006-2010) for Ecojustice Canada, German Technical Cooperation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. In July 2010, he took over as Director, Public Affairs and Communications for the David Suzuki Foundation, a national environmental non-profit based in Vancouver.
Siegrid Tautz, a social scientist who also holds a masters degree in Public Health, is director of the consulting firm 'evaplan' at the University of Heidelberg. For more than 20 years she has worked at the interface of social sciences and public health in advisory work, operational research, and training, specialising in sexual and reproductive health and rights including young people’s specific needs, gender, HIV & AIDS, and health promotion. Siegrid Tautz authored a number of strategic and concept papers in the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights for German Development Cooperation.
Sue Armstrong is a writer and broadcaster specialising in science, health and development. She has worked as a foreign correspondent in Brussels and South Africa, reporting for the BBC World Service radio, the Economist Development Report and New Scientist magazine among many other customers. Since the 1980s she has worked regularly for the World Health Organization, UNAIDS and other UN agencies. She wrote a book on AIDS, “Images of the Epidemic” for WHO in 1994, and was a writer and co-editor of “Preventing Maternal Deaths,” also published by WHO, in 1989. She has contributed five reports to UNAIDS “best practice” series, and is author of “A Matter of Life and Death: inside the hidden world of the pathologist” (2010), and “In Search of Freedom” (1989), written with Andreas Shipanga, a founder member of Namibia’s South West African People’s Organisation. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Stuart Adams has degrees in Sociology and Anthropology (B.A., British Columbia) and Urban and Regional Planning (M.Sc., Toronto). He was a Senior Social Planner for the City of Vancouver when he and two colleagues established a consulting firm that specialized in indigenous community development and focussed on social, economic, health and cultural research, policy and programme development, evaluation, and impact assessment. For BRC Imagination Arts, Stuart coordinated indigenous people’s participation in shows for World Fairs (Vancouver and Brisbane) and California theme parks (Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm). Since 2000, he has lived in the UK and done research, planning and writing for the WHO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, UN Interim Force in Lebanon, International Federation of Red and Red Crescent Societies, German Development Cooperation, and EPOS.
Karen Birdsall is a social scientist with degrees in history (BA, Swarthmore College, USA) and sociology and politics (MPhil, University of Cambridge). The early years of her professional life were spent in Russia and the former Soviet Union, where she worked during the 1990s for two different non-governmental organisations on issues related to post-Communist transition and developed an interest in Russia's informal economy. From 2002 to 2008 she lived in Johannesburg, where she worked as the research director at the Centre for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation, a local NGO specialising in social research on the HIV epidemic in South Africa and southern Africa more broadly. Since late 2008 she has been working as an independent consultant from her new home in Berlin, undertaking writing, research and evaluation projects for German International Cooperation and EPOS Health Management.
