Dr. Richard Harrigan is the Director of the Laboratory Program at the BC-CfE and an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses primarily on HIV drug efficacy, drug resistance, human and viral parameters that influence HIV disease progression.

His work has involved investigations using four major cohort studies (HOMER, VIDUS, VLAS, and Vanguard), as well as the more than five thousand patients in the Drug Treatment Program.

Richard Harrigan introduced one of Canada’s (and one of the world's) first broadly based clinical HIV drug resistance testing programs. This program has tested more than 10,000 clinical samples from across Canada.

As a result of this work, he has prepared several different academic publications that have alerted the scientific community to the impact of newly defined mutations associated with HIV drug resistance. Most recently, Dr. Harrigan has developed Canada's first genotypic HIV tropism test.

Richard Harrigan holds the CIHR-GSK Research Chair in HIV/AIDS at the University of British Columbia.