David Ho

David Da-i Ho (Chinese: 何大一; born November 3, 1952) is a Taiwanese-American medical doctor and HIV/AIDS researcher who was born in Taiwan and has made many innovative state of the art scientific contributions to the understanding and technological treatment of HIV infection. He is the scientific director and chief executive officer of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Irene Diamond Professor at Rockefeller University in New York City. In 2019 he and the Diamond Center will move to Columbia University, where he has been appointed Clyde ’56 and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine.David Ho was born in Taichung, Taiwan, to Paul (何步基 Hé Bùjī, an engineer) and Sonia Ho (Jiang) (江雙如 Jiāng Shuāngrú). David Ho attended Taichung Municipal Guang-Fu Elementary School until sixth grade before immigrating to the United States with his mother and younger brother to unite with his father, who had already been in the US since 1957. He grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from John Marshall High School there. He received his Bachelor of Science in physics with highest honors from the California Institute of Technology (1974) and MD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (1978). Subsequently, he did his clinical training in internal medicine and infectious diseases at UCLA School of Medicine (1978–1982) and Massachusetts General Hospital (1982–1985), respectively. He was a resident in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1981 when he came into contact with some of the first reported cases of what was later identified as AIDS.