Richard Strange grew up in London and graduated from King's College, Cambridge in 1963 with a degree in Physiology and Chemistry. He then spent five years in Africa, initially in Ghana as a school-teacher and member of VSO, the British Peace Corps. After ten years working in London, he moved to the USA in 1978 to work in IT for the US Environmental Protection Agency but then joined the IT staff of the World Bank in Washington DC in 1991, where he worked until 2012. Since the mid-1990s, he has been a volunteer participant in numerous NIH studies, including eight phase-1 drug trials, and vaccine studies and as a tissue donor. In 2010, he joined the CAB for the DC Cohort, a longitudinal study of HIV treatment in Washington DC, when it was first set up.