David Da-i Ho (Chinese: 何大一; pinyin: Hé Dà-yī; born November 3, 1952) is a Taiwanese-American[1][2][3][4][5] AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection.

[9] David Ho was born in Taiwan in 1952 and immigrated to the United States in 1965,[10] where he was educated at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School (through the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology) before getting his clinical training at UCLA School of Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital.

He is the founding scientific director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center[11] and the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons,[12] both housed at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Before 1996, AZT[8] and other early 1990s antiretroviral medication were prescribed in single therapy, which still did not prevent progression to fatal full-blown AIDS.

[8][15] In the mid-1990s, his research team conducted a series of elegant human studies to elucidate the dynamics of HIV replication in vivo.

[16] This knowledge, in turn, formed the foundation for their pioneering effort to treat HIV "early and hard"[8] and in demonstrating for the first time the durable control of HIV replication in patients receiving combination antiretroviral therapy,[17][18] which had subsequently developed by scientists at NIAID and Merck.

[19] He and his ADARC team presented the remarkable results from using combination antiretroviral therapy at International AIDS Conference 1996.

Ho was the chosen commencement speaker at Caltech,[30] MIT,[31] and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in 2000.