12/29/2025
After more than 30 years at amfAR and 18 years as chief executive officer, Kevin Robert Frost is retiring at the end of 2025. His deep commitment to the HIV community, dedication to amfAR, and trusted and inspiring leadership will be sorely missed. For the countless ways he helped strengthen the Foundation’s efforts to end AIDS once and for all and lay the groundwork to address other health threats in the years ahead, amfAR thanks him.
Under Frost’s leadership, amfAR boldly turned its research focus to curing HIV, with the launch of the amfAR Research Consortium on HIV Eradication (ARCHE) grants in 2010. Later, a five-year Countdown to a Cure for AIDS initiative raised more than $50 million for new investments in cure research and led to the founding of the amfAR Institute for HIV Cure Research at the University of California, San Francisco.
amfAR also established ICiStem, a consortium of European researchers attempting to replicate the circumstances that led to the groundbreaking cure of Timothy Ray Brown, the Berlin patient. Three of the subsequent 10 cure cases—the London, Düsseldorf, and Geneva patients—were part of the ICISTEM cohort.
As an amfAR vice president prior to becoming CEO, Frost launched amfAR’s TREAT Asia program—a network of hospitals, community clinics, NGOs, and healthcare facilities working together with civil society in 12 countries—in Bangkok, Thailand, and served as its founding director.
Frost has served on various international HIV/AIDS advisory committees and on advisory panels for the U.S. FDA. He has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including The Lancet and Journal of AIDS (JAIDS), and, in 2010, he was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS (PACHA).
Prior to joining amfAR, Frost contributed to the HIV response as the inpatient care coordinator of the AIDS program at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital and as a research assistant at the New York University Medical Center, where he worked primarily on clinical research studies of cytomegalovirus retinitis in people with HIV/AIDS. He was also a member of ACT UP.
