Susana has
been engaged in the response to HIV/AIDS for the last 13 years. She is
originally from Portugal,
where she started as a volunteer with a main Portuguese HIV/AIDS NGO whilst studying
for a degree in Science. In 1998 she moved to Oxford
to do her Doctorate in HIV Immunology at the Faculty of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford. In 2000 she started to carry out
research in HIV-2 infection in Gambia.
Her passion to find solutions to the HIV epidemic led her to join a team
working on a clinical trial for an HIV vaccine funded by the International AIDS
Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) completed in 2005. By then she felt quite frustrated
by both the lack of medical infrastructure in so many countries. In contrary to
that she has been amazed with how businesses reach even the farthest villages.
So she started to think of different and innovative ways to make health care
and HIV/ AIDS prevention, education and treatment widely accessible by trying
to think like an entrepreneur for socioeconomic impact.
In 2005 Susana
was awarded a Skoll Scholarship on Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll
Foundation/ SkollCenter for Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford that allowed her to pursue an MBA at Oxford SAID BusinessSchool and to further develop plans to
work on sustainable health care solutions in West Africa.
After
completing her MBA and a strategic consulting project at the Department of
Peacekeeping Operations, United Nations, Susana launched Local InSight, a
social enterprise aimed at ensuring equitable healthcare globally. She has
worked as technical expert with the Ministry of Health in Portugal and as a consultant in USA-based I-TECH
on an HIV project in Mozambique.
Currently, Susana is Invited Professor of Business Sustainability at the Lisbon
MBA. She serves as Executive Director of the Social Entrepreneurship Institute
(IES) in Portugal and works
as a consultant for UNDP in Geneva.
She is part of the Expert Panel and is Senior Advisor for Business Sector
Rating of AIDS Accountability International (AAI) and a Mentor at the Legatum Centre for Development
& Entrepreneurship at MIT. Susana is
also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, and a Member of the
Economic Research Council, UK.
