He attended college at Rice University and graduated magna cum laude in 1975 with a BA degree in biology.

[4] By 1982, Graham was appointed chief resident at Nashville General Hospital,[5] where he treated Tennessee's first AIDS patient.

[6] Following this, he was named to a chief residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center,[7] where he led one of the first human trials of candidate AIDS vaccines.

[8] The results of the trial found that the two experimental AIDS vaccines proved to yield the best immune response in patients.

Moving from inception to manufacturing in just three months, they began a Phase 2 clinical trial in March 2017 to measure its effectiveness.