Robert Gallo

Robert Gallo

Robert Charles Gallo (born March 23, 1937) is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.

Gallo is the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He and two longtime scientific collaborators, Robert R. Redfield and William A. Blattner, co-founded the institute in 1996 in a partnership including the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. In 2005, Gallo co-founded Profectus BioSciences, Inc., which develops and commercializes technologies to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by human viral diseases, including HIV.

Gallo was born in Waterbury, Connecticut to a working-class family of Italian immigrants. He earned a BS degree in Biology in 1959 from Providence College and received an MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1963. After completing his medical residency at the University of Chicago, he became a researcher at the National Cancer Institute. Gallo states that his choice of profession was influenced by the early death of his sister from leukemia, a disease to which he initially dedicated much of his research.