Gregg Gonsalves—an South Africa-based AIDS activist credited with accelerating the international approval process for AIDS drugs—has been awarded the $100,000 John M. Lloyd AIDS Leadership Award, the Biloxi, Mississipi-based newspaper The Sun Herald reports (sunherald.com, 3/27).

Gonzalves, an American who has been an AIDS activist for 17 years, is currently coordinator of a regional AIDS and tuberculosis treatment advocacy program in Cape Town. He cofounded the Treatment Action Group, an AIDS advocacy organization based in New York, and served as the director of Treatment and Prevention Advocacy for Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), also in New York.

“Gregg Gonsalves is a most distinguished HIV/AIDS and human rights activist,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “A true leader, he is equally at home on the streets of Greenwich Village, in the corridors of scientific and political influence of Washington, DC, and in the clinics of South Africa.”