Gavin is a senior editor for the Public Library of Science. He is a product of three continents - he was born in Cape Town, raised in London, and now lives in San Francisco. He studied medicine at the University of Oxford and University College London, graduating in 1994. After five years of working as a physician in a variety of settings - including an AIDS hospice, a dialysis ward, and a brain injuries unit - he joined the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 1999 as a trainee in medical journalism and editing. In 2001, he moved to San Francisco to be the deputy editor of the Western Journal of Medicine, published by the BMJ and the University of California. Gavin has written extensively on global health, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, and has helped to train medical editors at workshops in Barcelona and Addis Ababa.