Founder of AIDS Vaccine Charity Seeks Collaboration in New Role

Where he’s going: Seth Berkley, 54, stepped down last month from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the group he started 17 years ago, to take the top job at the GAVI Alliance, a partnership among nonprofits, governments, and companies that seeks to increase poor people’s access to vaccines.

His background: An epidemiologist, Dr. Berkley held positions at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Carter Center, and the Rockefeller Foundation before starting IAVI. Its mission is to facilitate progress in developing an AIDS vaccine.

Proudest accomplishment: The AIDS group’s role in helping to establish that nonprofit groups, not just companies and governments, can play an important role in vaccine research. Dr. Berkley says that notion was viewed as ludicrous when the group was first getting off the ground in 1994. He’s also proud of how the organization’s work in Africa has helped overcome skepticism that African researchers and laboratories had the skills to do disease research and trials.

His biggest frustration with philanthropy: What he sees as the risk-averse nature of foundations and their reluctance to support long-term projects like vaccine research. “That foundations would take 15 or 20 years and solve a really big problem used to be the way foundations worked,” he says, citing the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of the Green Revolution, a series of innovations that boosted global agricultural production. “The mentality has become much more around, ‘How do we keep our boards seeing that we’re doing innovative and new things?’”

A positive trend: The greater cooperation, he says, among governments, companies, and nonprofits: “It’s a completely new way of doing business that makes a lot more sense.”

Salary: $460,000

What he’s reading: House on Fire, an autobiography by William Foege about his work to cure smallpox.

Hobbies: A pilot and a sailor, Dr. Berkley says he’s sad to leave his boat behind for landlocked Switzerland, where the GAVI Alliance is located.