Dr. Adele Schwartz Benzaken is AHF’s Senior Global Medical Director. Her story is next in our “I Am AHF” series featuring remarkable staff, clients, and partners who are doing what’s right to save lives everyday.
Interviewed by Diana Shpak, Knowledge Management Focal Point, AHF Europe.
Dr. Adele Schwartz Benzaken, AHF Senior Global Medical Director, is a devoted mother of two beautiful daughters and one son, a proud grandmother of five grandchildren, and a woman whose life’s work has been dedicated to HIV/STI prevention, care, and public health.
At the start of our conversation, Dr. Adele shared a tender glimpse into a joyful family reunion. One daughter had arrived from the U.S., while the other had come from São Paulo to Manaus, Brazil. With the family gathered at home, it was clearly a house filled with warmth and laughter.
With roots stretching across continents and histories marked by resilience, Dr. Adele’s life has been shaped by both heritage and purpose. Born in Manaus, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, she grew up carrying the legacy of extraordinary journeys. Her father was a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, Austria, and her mother came from a Moroccan family that had made its way to the Amazon. These family stories of survival, migration, dignity, and perseverance became the quiet foundation of Dr. Adele’s path.
She completed her medical studies in Curitiba and residency in Rio de Janeiro, and later returned to Manaus, where she was invited to establish an STI clinic. When HIV emerged, the clinic expanded to embrace the new reality, and Dr. Adele began what would become a lifelong dedication to people living on the margins of care and visibility.
Her first major HIV project focused on sex workers in the city, reflecting a deep personal commitment to stand beside those who were too often neglected or judged. She often recalls how strongly her father spoke against discrimination, warning that hatred toward one group never ends there. “My father always made opposing discrimination his first rule in life, and he reminded me all the time how important it was to work with neglected people,” said Dr. Adele. That lesson stayed with her and helped define not only her professional mission, but also the compassion with which she carried it out.
Over the years, Dr. Adele became a pioneering force in HIV prevention and public health in Brazil. Her work extended from sex workers and prison populations to gay communities and other men who have sex with men, helping support the formation of community organizations in Manaus and deep in the interior of the Amazon. She later expanded this work to Indigenous communities, where the challenges were immense: remote settings, no electricity, no laboratories, and limited access to healthcare.
A boy from an Indigenous Yanomami community teaches Dr. Adele how to drink from the river.
Yet it was precisely there that Dr. Adele helped lead groundbreaking efforts to implement rapid HIV and syphilis testing, becoming a global pioneer in bringing these tools to underserved populations. Her work validating syphilis rapid testing among Indigenous communities received recognition from the World Health Organization, while UNICEF honored her contributions to building strategies aimed at eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
What makes Dr. Adele’s journey especially remarkable is that her fieldwork was never separated from science. Alongside direct service and program development, she consistently documented and studied what she was building, turning practical public health into operational research with lasting influence. Her projects led to important publications on interventions with sex workers and on the implementation of syphilis rapid testing, which became the focus of her doctoral thesis. That body of evidence would eventually help change Brazil’s national health system. “I don’t do research just for research. All the time in my mind is how I can do this research to help people or to change policies,” said Dr. Adele.
At a key meeting attended by the Minister of Health, Dr. Adele introduced herself simply but powerfully. She was a doctor from the Amazon working with syphilis rapid testing, and if it worked in the Amazon, she said, it would work anywhere in Brazil. That moment, supported by years of evidence, dedication, and vision, helped lead to the nationwide incorporation of syphilis rapid testing into Brazil’s public health system.
Dr. Adele’s journey continued from local leadership to national and then global impact. She went on to lead the state program, later joined Brazil’s Ministry of Health (MoH), and eventually became director of the country’s HIV program. It was during her time at the MoH that AHF first entered her life. When AHF needed antiretroviral medicines for Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, Dr. Adele helped make Brazil’s donation possible. That first collaboration became the beginning of a much deeper connection.
Later, when AHF started working in the Amazon region, Dr. Adele saw an opportunity to turn evidence into change. Concerned about the burden placed on one major hospital caring for nearly 15,000 clients, she encouraged a study to show how overwhelming numbers were affecting quality of care. With AHF’s support, the research helped demonstrate the need for the decentralization of HIV care, and over time, new facilities were opened (currently AHF Brazil-supported facilities), bringing services closer to people. For Dr. Adele, this reflected the way she has always worked, using research not only as an academic exercise but as a tool to improve lives and influence policy.
After leaving the MoH in early 2019, Dr. Adele was invited to join AHF. By April of that year, she had begun a new chapter that has now lasted seven years. Today, as AHF Senior Global Medical Director, she works across 50 countries. The work is demanding and often involves constant travel, yet her sense of purpose remains unchanged. Throughout every stage of her career, Dr. Adele remains driven by the same quiet conviction that public health must always be rooted in equity, compassion, and justice.
At AHF, Dr. Adele’s first major goal was to improve the way data was understood and trusted. She and the global team helped build internal confidence in data as a powerful tool for evidence-based action, ensuring that information could truly serve people and programs. She also played a key role in the expansion of AHF’s Wellness Centers, which provide free STI testing and treatment, helping turn an important AHF vision into a reality embraced across AHF’s country programs.
Brazil recently eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and Dr. Adele played a part in this major achievement, a public health milestone and the result of years of careful, deeply human work. While serving at Brazil’s MoH, she became part of a Pan American Health Organization-led regional effort to build the tools and standards that would help countries move toward elimination.
“I keep my passion going. Sometimes people don’t understand why it is a passion. But it is. What moves us is also this kind of joy and passion in the work that we do. I’m very passionate about human rights, gender issues, and vulnerable populations. My focus is to help people, to be very strong and very humanistic,” said Dr. Adele with a smile.
In 2023, Dr. Adele received the Medal of the National Order of Scientific Merit from Brazilian President Lula. One of Brazil’s highest honors, it’s awarded to scientists, researchers, and institutions, both Brazilian and foreign, who have made significant contributions to the advancement of science, technology, and innovation. The recognition celebrated her many years of dedication to the fight for equity in health. According to Dr. Adele, it also represented a reunion with her utopian ideals and renewed her drive to continue pursuing them. As she says, “None of this would ever have happened” if she “hadn’t had the immense privilege of working with incredibly valuable and dedicated people who share her passion for changing the world, just as it has been at AHF.”
At the end of our conversation, I asked Dr. Adele what the meaning of life is for her. Her answer revealed something essential about the person she is. For Dr. Adele, the meaning of life is found in balance between family and career, between the joy of a full home and the quiet focus of purposeful work. As a woman, mother, grandmother, spouse, and leader, she continues to move forward with the same grace that has marked her journey: a deep love for people, a passion for service, and a life guided by both heart and dedication.
Dr. Adele’s story is one of tenderness and strength, science and service, courage and humanity. It is the story of a woman whose life’s work has been guided by a profound sense of purpose, and whose dedication to the fight against HIV has touched countless lives across Brazil and far beyond.
Perhaps this story, filled with dedication and passion, will inspire others to look deeper into their own lives and find the path that truly belongs to them. Because when you meet people like Dr. Adele and see the spark in their eyes when they speak about their work, you are reminded that a true calling is not only something we do, but something that lights us from within.
