Dr. Amaya Gillespie is Principal Visiting Fellow at UNU-IIGH.
Dr. Amaya Gillespie manages Global Partnerships and Special Initiatives in the Program Division of UNICEF Headquarters, in New York. She holds a Master of Science degree in Public Health and a PhD in health-related behavior change and has worked across a range of sectors including education, child protection, HIV and reproductive health. In November 2014, she was deployed to Sierra Leone as the lead on behavior change and community engagement, as part
of the national response to address the Ebola outbreak. Dr. Gillespie has held a range of leadership positions within the UN, starting in East Asia and The Pacific in the mid-1990s, managing large multi-
country programs focusing on social and behavior change programs related to HIV, sexual and reproductive health and a wide range of related social and health issues, including gender and human rights. She was the Director of the UN Secretary General’s Study on Violence against Children, the first global collection of evidence on the issue which has since stimulated programs worldwide. Subsequently she
was the UNAIDS Country Coordinator in Zambia from 2009 to 2011. She advises on a number of NGO and not-for-profit boards, in the interests of child and adolescent health.
She is an adjunct Professor and an inaugural member of the External Engagement Committee for the Institute of Biomedical Health and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.