Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot, (born 17 February 1949) is a Belgian-British microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS. After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide. He is the author of 16 books and over 600 scientific articles. Early life and education Piot was born in Leuven, Belgium. His father was a civil servant who worked with agricultural exports and his mother ran a construction company. Piot is the oldest of two brothers and a sister. After beginning in the school of engineering and physics at Ghent University studying physics, Piot changed to medicine. During medical school, Piot received a Diploma in Tropical Medicine (DTM) from the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp in Antwerp. In 1974, he received an MD degree from Ghent University. In 1980, Piot received a PhD degree in clinical microbiology from the University of Antwerp. Career In 1976, while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was part of a team that observed a Marburg-like virus in a sample of blood taken from a sick nun working in Zaire. Piot and his colleagues subsequently traveled to Zaire as part of an International Commission set up by the Government of Zaire to help quell the outbreak. The International Commission made key discoveries into how the virus spread, and traveled from village to village, spreading information and putting the ill and those who had come into contact with them into quarantine. The epidemic was already waning when the International Commission arrived, thanks to measures taken by local and national authorities, and it finally stopped in three months, after it had killed almost 300 people. The events were dramatised by Mike Walker on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 in a production by David Morley. Piot narrated the programme. Piot has received the majority of the credit for discovering Ebola, since in 1976, it was claimed he was the one to receive blood samples while working in a lab at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. The samples were once claimed to be originally sent by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a Congolese doctor who obtained