RCF introduces New ISC Chairs

Welcoming Our New Chairs

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Sushena Reza-Paul as Chair and Kate Thomson as Vice-Chair of the Robert Carr Fund. Both bring decades of leadership, deep community partnerships, and a long-standing commitment to advancing rights-based, community-led responses.

Dr. Sushena Reza-Paul
Chair

Sushena Reza-Paul is a public health physician with more than twenty years of experience working alongside marginalised and under served communities. She began her career in reproductive health and later moved into HIV programming in the late 1990s. After early clinical work in obstetrics and gynecology, she relocated to Bangladesh where she worked with leading organisations including BRAC and CARE Bangladesh.

Sushena holds an MPH and DrPH from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. At the University of Manitoba, she helped establish one of the earliest large-scale intervention programmes supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in India—an initiative that later shaped national HIV responses. Her work has contributed to early research and demonstration of PrEP for female sex workers, rooted in community participation and leadership.

She has provided technical support to key population programmes across the Asia-Pacific region through the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. In India, she was instrumental in strengthening the national programme’s investment in community-based organisations and supported the growth of Ashodaya Samithi in Mysore. She also played a key role in the development of the sex workers’ academy, a pioneering model that transformed community-led learning and research.

Kate Thomson
Vice-Chair

Kate Thomson has worked in global health for nearly four decades. She began her career within community and civil society organisations before moving into senior leadership roles in multilateral institutions. Over the years, she has built strong and enduring relationships across community networks, governments, multilateral agencies, and philanthropic partners, using these connections to drive meaningful policy and programmatic change.

From 2013 to 2023, Kate served as Head of Community, Rights and Gender at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In this role, she established and led a department responsible for human rights, gender, health equity, community systems and community engagement. Before joining the Global Fund, she spent eight years at UNAIDS where she led the Community Mobilization Division, advancing civil society participation in global policy shaping, strategy development, and high-level political processes.

Kate’s leadership in global health began in the mid-1980s when she helped establish Positively Women, now Positively UK. She was also a founding member and early coordinator of the International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW). Throughout her career, she has championed the central role of communities in shaping effective, equitable, and sustainable health responses.