David Ho  David Da-i Ho (; born November 3, 1952) is a Taiwanese-American AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He is the founding scientific director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. David Ho was born in Taichung, Taiwan, to Paul (, an engineer) and Sonia Ho (Jiang) (). 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. He received his Bachelor of Science in biology 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. Ho has been engaged in HIV/AIDS research since the beginning of the pandemic, initially focusing on clinical virology and select topics in HIV pathogenesis. In the mid 1990s, his research team conducted a series of elegant human studies to elucidate the dynamics of HIV replication in vivo. This knowledge, in turn, formed the foundation for their pioneering effort to treat HIV "early and hard" and in demonstrating for the first time the durable control of HIV replication in patients receiving combination antiretroviral therapy. This was the turning point in the epidemic that an automatic death sentence was transformed into a manageable disease. For the past decade and a half, Dr. Ho has shifted his research focus to developing strategies to prevent HIV transmission. A protective vaccine against HIV remains elusive despite concerted research efforts. However, Dr. Ho has been leading non-vaccine approaches to block HIV transmission that have shown considerable promise. His group was the first to demonstrate protective efficacy of a long-acting antiretroviral drug as pre-exposure prophylaxis in rhesus macaques. In fact, one such agent, cabotegravir, has been advanced into Phase-3 efficacy trials in high-risk populations, in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline.