With over twenty-five years in global philanthropy and social justice, Bruce has had the pleasure of working with visionary and high-profile people and brands to leverage their public platforms for positive impact. He has worked on a diverse range of issues, including HIV stigma, treatment, and prevention; global health equity; childhood obesity; child homelessness; poverty alleviation; refugee rights; girls' empowerment; gang violence interventions; arts education; and integrative medicine. 

In January 2016, Bruce took a hiatus from IPG to work full-time as the Founding Executive Director of the Prevention Access Campaign (PAC) and to launch the U=U campaign, an award-winning international health and human rights movement that disrupted how science and public health information reach the public. Bruce mobilized effective multi-sector partnerships and built a coalition that successfully moved the U=U concept and campaign from the grassroots to a global mandate. U=U is transforming lives and accelerating an end to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  

More about Bruce & U=U:

"The Lancet Profile: Bruce Richman: Building the U=U movement for HIV prevention" (The Lancet December, 2023)

"Bruce Richman: Meet the Man Behind U=U: U=U is one of the biggest developments in HIV since antiretrovirals, but there's more work to be done" (Plus Magazine January 2020) 

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci,  "U=U is the foundation of being able to end the epidemic" International AIDS Conference, July 2019 

Bruce is passionate about U=U because it changed his life.  In 2012, nine years after Bruce's HIV diagnosis, he learned the radical news from his HIV doctor: HIV treatment had reduced his virus to a level undetectable by tests, which meant that he was not only staying healthy, but he could not transmit HIV to sexual partners (now known as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U)). Almost a decade of internalized stigma and depression had begun to lift. He never imagined that he could be intimate, have sex, and conceive children without any fear of passing on HIV to a partner.  
 
He also learned that roughly over twenty million people living with HIV worldwide who also had undetectable viral loads were not being informed that they could not pass on HIV, and over fifteen million did not have access to the treatment and care to experience U=U, protecting their health and their partners. This transformational information was stuck in the realm of science and only discussed and debated at the highest levels in research and academia. As a result, people living with HIV were not informed about science that would dramatically transform their social, sexual, and reproductive lives and reduce new HIV transmissions. They continued to suffer from internal and external harm due to longstanding HIV stigma. People living with HIV continued to experience fear of HIV transmission in the most intimate moments of their lives. By withholding this information, opportunities to reduce HIV stigma, save lives and accelerate an end to the epidemic were wasted. 
 
In 2015, to respond to this health and human rights crisis, Bruce mobilized researchers and activists to form Prevention Access Campaign (PAC) and build the U=U movement. PAC created a global science-based consensus statement confirming that U=U was indeed true, worked with the community to coin the phrase Undetectable=Untransmittable or U=U and launch the U=U movement in July 2016 to build a critical mass of influential leaders and organizations to endorse the message and ensure that the groundbreaking science reached the people and field it was intended to benefit.
 
Today, the U=U is a thriving health and human rights movement that spans every continent, with over 1000 partner organizations from more than 100 countries committed to sharing this monumental message with people living with HIV, healthcare providers, policymakers, and the public. The message is so important that it has been endorsed and even mandated by the global medical and scientific community, including the World Health Organization (WHO), U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, National Institutes of Health (NIH), United Nations (UN), and many governments worldwide. The movement is sharing the groundbreaking news from Brazil to China to Russia to South Africa and fighting for access to quality healthcare to keep people living with HIV healthy and prevent new transmissions. 

Bruce, PAC, and the campaign have been featured extensively in the media and research journals including The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Washington Post, The Lancet HIV, TODAY Show, The Guardian, The New York Times, CBS Evening News, MD Magazine, CBC Canada News, USA Today, and China Global Television Network. 

Bruce was honored by Healthline magazine as HIV Honors 2017 "Person of the Year," and Plus Magazine named him "#1 of Most Amazing HIV+ People of 2018." In 2017, Healthline named the U=U campaign "Best HIV Patient Advocacy Organization", POZ magazine awarded U=U 2017's "Best Media Campaign for People Living with HIV," and NASTAD awarded Bruce and U=U the Partnership Award. In 2019, Bruce was chosen as #15 of the Pride Power 100 (recognizing New York's 100 "most powerful members of the LGBTQ community"), honored with the Red Ribbon Award from VNP+ (the positive people's group of Vietnam), received the Shelby Hodge Vision Award from AIDS Foundation Houston, and the U.S. Congress honored Prevention Access Campaign and U=U with Congressional Recognition. In 2020, Bruce was named again in the New York Pride Power 100 and Health 100 and honored as "Stigma Warrior" from Howard University's International Conference on Stigma.  In 2021, Bruce was named again to the New York Power Pride 100, received the Hyancith Award from the Hyacinth Foundation, and awarded the Martin Delaney Power of One HIV/AIDS Advocacy Award by the community of people living with HIV at the Positive Living Conference.
 
Bruce received his B.A. from Brown University, his Ed.M. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. 

Updated: December 2023