[18] In 2008, he enrolled in Yale College as part of the Eli Whitney Students Program and obtained a BS with distinction in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2011.
From 2011 to 2012, he was an Open Society Foundations Fellow comparing social movements on AIDS, tuberculosis and maternal health in South Africa, Brazil and Ukraine.
[20] He writes regularly for the popular press and has contributed op-eds and articles to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and The Nation.
In 2019, he received an Avenir award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a grant program devoted "to early-stage investigators who propose highly innovative studies [and] researchers who represent the future of addiction science" for his proposal to examine the syndemic of HIV, hepatitis C and overdose in the context of the US opioid crisis.
[32] Gonsalves and Mark Harrington are the only two AIDS activists to ever receive a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant".