GREGG GONSALVES is a global health activist, an epidemiologist, an Assistant Professor at Yale School of Public Health  and an Associate Professor (adjunct) at Yale Law School. He was born on this date in Mineola, New York and grew up in nearby East Meadow, NY and attended East Meadow High School.

He began working with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) in 1990, going on to co-found the Treatment Action Group (TAG) in 1992, with his colleagues from the Treatment and Data Committee of ACT UP New York, including Peter Staley, Mark Harrington and Spencer Cox. With TAG, he authored several reports on HIV research, including a critical review of AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, which led to a reorganization of the NIH’s AIDS program by Congress. He found out he was HIV+ in 1995. In 2000, Gonsalves went on to join Gay Men’s Health Crisis and its Department of Public Policy. In 2006, Gonsalves moved to Cape Town, South Africa to work for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa where he was part of campaigns to expand access to antiretroviral therapy in Southern Africa. In the mid-2000s, he gave well-regarded plenary speeches at two back-to-back International AIDS Conferences in Toronto and Mexico City. He is also a co-founder of the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, a collective of AIDS activists from around the world fighting for access to AIDS treatment and other life-saving medicines through education, monitoring and advocacy. In 2008, he received $100,000 as the first recipient of the AIDS Leadership Award from the John M. Lloyd Foundation.

He joined the faculty of Yale School of Public Health in 2017. His research focuses on using quantitative models to improve the delivery of services and shape policy-making on HIV/AIDS. At Yale, he is affiliated with the Public Health Modeling Unit and the Yale Program in Addiction Medicine. In 2019, he received an Avenir award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a grant program devoted “to early-stage investigators who propose highly innovative studies [and] researchers who represent the future of addiction science” for his proposal to examine the syndemic of HIV, hepatitis C and overdose in the contest of the US opioid crisis. In 2018, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.