People

Will Hughes is a Columbia alumnus, graduating from Columbia College with the class of 2013. While at Columbia, Will was Vice President of Policy for the Columbia College Student Council, and President of the Columbia University Performing Arts League.

He also acted as the lead for the Advocates for the Arts Initiative, a student advisory committee formed in 2009 to safeguard and preserve the Columbia University Arts Initiative, created by University President Lee Bollinger in 2004. The Arts Initiative was created to make the arts part of the experience of every Columbia student's education and to promote a life-long involvement in the arts. After Bollinger announced that management of the Arts Initiative would move from the President's Office to the Columbia School of the Arts, students became worried that the move was a sign that the program would be dissolved and formed the Advocates for the Arts Initiative committee. Under Will's leadership, the Initiative was approved for full funding due in large part to a successful petition campaign Will had overseen.

Will was also very active in organizations for the LGBTQ+ community, including the Columbia Queer Alliance, Gender Revolution both of which he worked alongside to push for a Queer Studies curriculum, as well as GHAP within which he was an advocate, providing peer counseling to students worried about HIV or who had been diagnosed with the virus.

During his undergraduate tenure at Columbia, Will was inspired by the stories that he heard from Laura Pinsky, Daniel Chiarilli and others, and created the first GHAP Archive. Much of the historical summaries, collected documents, and interviews on this site are the result of Will's hard work and dedication to GHAP's history and ongoing mission.

Paul was a graduate student at Columbia, studying Computer Science. He co-founded GHAP with Laura Pinsky in 1985 and was passionate and dedicated to the group and it's mission.

When GHAP began providing HIV testing, Paul volunteered to be part of the first group and was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Laura Pinsky remembers that the diagnosis made GHAP's mission that much more important for both of them because he was her best friend.

Paul died from complications of the disease in 1995 but his spirit lives on through the work of GHAP and published materials he contributed to, like The HIV/AIDS Fact Book.

Laura Pinsky is the co-founder and former director of GHAP. She additionally was a counselor for Counseling and Psychological Services at Columbia Health, working with students whose mental health was affected by a physical illness. When Laura started at Columbia Health in the early 80s, those infected with AIDS quickly grew to become the largest group of those she counseled. With Paul Harding-Douglas, she co-founded GHAP as a way of increasing the amount of accurate information and education available to Columbia Students regarding AIDS. Because of this, both she and Paul were made members of the Columbia University Committee on AIDS, convened in 1987. Later, she and Paul co-authored The Essential AIDS Fact Book (Pocket Books, 1987) and The Essential HIV Treatment Fact Book (Pocket Books, 1992.) She retired in 2014.

Daniel Chiarilli was the former Associate Director of GHAP and was with the group until 2024. He began volunteering with GHAP in 2000, when he was receiving his PhD in musicology. In addition to leading GHAP, he also was a counselor for the university’s smoking cessation program and an adjunct professor in the department of Music.