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© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. I am pleased to have this opportunity to write a preface for this special issue on behalf of the journal “AIDS Research and Therapy”. My research team within Imperial College London (UK) and the European AIDS Vaccine Initiative 2020 (EAVI2020) that I co-ordinate have long-term collaborations with HIV researchers in Canada, and I was invited to attend the Canadian HIV Vaccine Workshop supported by Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative (CHVI) in Ottawa in December 2016. I was deeply impressed by the success and achievements made by the Canadian HIV vaccine research community. The workshop highlighted the ability of Canadian researchers to make unique contributions in the HIV vaccine research field.