Officer of the Order of Canada

• Awarded on: November 20, 2014
• Invested on: February 12, 2016

Julio Montaner has helped set the global standard of care for HIV/AIDS. He is the director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the Chair in AIDS Research at the University of British Columbia, and the former president of the International AIDS Society. His groundbreaking clinical trials identified combination antiretroviral drug therapy as the first effective treatment for preventing HIV transmission, the progression of the virus to AIDS, and premature death. In his province, he initiated a comprehensive strategy known as Treatment as Prevention that has recently been adopted by the United Nations as the cornerstone for the control of HIV/AIDS.