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© The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creat iveco mmons .org/ publi cdoma in/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Scientia Professor David Cooper, founding director of the Kirby Institute, died on Sunday 18 March. His work on HIV infection made him an internationally renowned clinician scientist and advocate. The name David Cooper has, over the past three decades, become synonymous with HIV research and treatment in Australia. Throughout his career, he was consistently at the forefront of clinical and immunological research into the virus; his inquisitiveness coupled with his compassion for his fellow person were traits that he possessed from a very young age. Born in Sydney in 1949, Cooper finished high school aged 15 and immediately commenced medical studies at the University of Sydney against advice to have a year or two off. He graduated as a doctor in 1972, with first class honours and a couple of research publications. By 1980 he had obtained fellowships in internal medicine and pathology, qualifying him as an immunologist, and had completed his Doctoral degree in human B cell biology. It was during his post-doctoral stint at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in 1981 that Cooper first learned of an unknown and aggressive immune deficiency syndrome that was highly prevalent in gay men and intravenous drug users (IDU). Having seen the devastating early effects of AIDS on the immune system in the US, Cooper returned to the Department of Clinical Immunology at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney in 1983. He anticipated not only that a similar epidemic would reach Australia, but that it would affect those same populations, meaning that St Vincent’s, being located close to the hub of gay culture in Sydney, would become an epicentre of the HIV epidemic in Australia. His hypothesis was proven correct, with HIV spreading rapidly among 4500 people, predominantly gay men, from 1983 to 1985. Cooper really set the foundation for Australia’s response to the HIV epidemic in these early days, with the establishment of one of Australia’s first HIV cohort studies in 1983. Cooper and colleagues swiftly enlisted over 1000 gay men into a prospective study that collected clinical data and biobanked samples to begin searching for answers in anticipation of a frightening epidemic. The results of this clinico-pathological study were seminal in Australia’s, and indeed the world’s, response to HIV, with Cooper explaining for the first time the events of “seroconversion illness”, or primary HIV infection, in his 1985 paper published in The Lancet. This collaborative study, centred on patients and linking primary and tertiary Open Access Retrovirology