Dr. Keith McAdam is the founding director of the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) (2004-7), seconded from Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He is emeritus professor of clinical tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a position he held from 1985 to 2004. From 1994 to 2003, Dr. McAdam was seconded to West Africa to serve as director of the UK Medical Research Council Laboratories in the Republic of The Gambia. Dr. McAdam grew up in Uganda, where his father, Sir Ian McAdam, was Professor of Surgery at Makerere. He did his schooling in Kenya and went on to study medicine at Cambridge University and the Middlesex Hospital in London. After training in internal medicine in London, he spent three years at the Institute of Medical Research in Papua New Guinea working on leprosy, malaria, and filariasis as causes of secondary amyloidosis. Two years, from 1975 to 1977, Dr. McAdam developed his laboratory and clinical research focus on inflammation, acute phase proteins, and cytokines, at the Immunology Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and continued this focus over the next seven years in Boston as a clinical scientist in the Department of Medicine at Tufts New England Medical Center. Professor McAdam was medical advisor to the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on AIDS in 1987 and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics working party that produced an authoritative publication The Ethics of Healthcare Related Research in Developing Countries. He is currently associate international director at the Royal College of Physicians in London and on the International Board of the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF)