Dr. McCune is head of the HIV Frontiers Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He started to treat patients with HIV disease as a resident in internal medicine at UCSF from 1982 to 1984, and has been involved in the HIV/AIDS research field ever since, from postdoctoral studies at Stanford, to co-founding companies, such as SyStemix (1988) and Progenesys (1991), where he served first as CEO and then as a scientific director until returning to academia.

Dr. McCune joined UCSF as an investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, the chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine at UCSF, and the founding PI and senior associate dean of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.

In recent years, he has helped to form multidisciplinary, collaborative research teams to find a cure for HIV disease. Throughout this time, he has taken care of patients with HIV disease at the San Francisco General Hospital.