Eric Goosby

In the early 1980s, the wards of San Francisco General Hospital filled with patients no one knew how to treat. Eric Goosby, then completing his training there, has recalled losing fifteen to twenty patients a week to the disease that would come to be called AIDS. That experience set the direction of a career spent building systems of care for people the epidemic was killing.

At San Francisco General, where he served as associate medical director of the hospital's AIDS program from 1984 to 1991, Goosby helped pioneer the San Francisco model of HIV care, an approach that connected testing and treatment with the support services patients needed to stay in care. He carried that experience into government. During the Clinton administration, he became the founding director of the Ryan White CARE Act program at the Department of Health and Human Services, the largest federally funded HIV/AIDS care program in the United States, and later served as deputy director of the White House AIDS office.

In 2001, he became chief executive and chief medical officer of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation, extending his work into international health. From 2009 to 2013, under President Obama, he served as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator with the rank of ambassador, overseeing implementation of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease. That work belonged to a broad network of clinicians, governments and partner organizations, and it meant scaling treatment across the countries where HIV was doing its worst damage.

His service continued after Washington. In 2015, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed him the UN's Special Envoy on Tuberculosis, a role he held until 2019, working to raise the profile of a disease that remains among the world's leading infectious killers.

UCSF's faculty directory lists him as professor emeritus of medicine and MacArthur Foundation Chair in Global Health Sciences. A Lancet profile described him as having been at the forefront of the fight against HIV since the epidemic began. The Ryan White CARE Act program he founded remains the largest federally funded HIV/AIDS care program in the United States.