North Dakotan leads while living with HIV, earns Bush Fellowship
A Bismarck man who has experienced substance abuse, recovery and living with HIV is hoping to develop his leadership skills after being awarded a Bush Foundation fellowship.
'I've been able to change my own life and work to help others to do the same,' Jason Grueneich told the North Dakota Monitor. 'I'm just lucky to be alive and here doing the work. And it's amazing that the Bush Foundation saw something in me.'
Grueneich's work includes being an advocate for those living with HIV. He created Bismarck's first LGBTQ+ recovery group and this year founded Shine Bright and Live, an HIV-focused nonprofit, and helped repeal a North Dakota state law that he said stigmatized people who are HIV positive.
Grueneich is one of three North Dakotans awarded a Bush Fellowship in 2025. Up to 30 Bush Fellows are selected each year to receive up to $150,000 to support their leadership goals. Fellows can come from any sector — including business, nonprofit and government, according to the Bush Foundation.
Grueneich said the Bush Foundation isn't so much about funding a project but investing in leaders.
'Leaders work to bring as many people with them as possible,' Grueneich said. 'It ripples out into the community and raises people up.'
Gruenich grew up in Bismarck but said he moved away, developed a substance abuse problem and became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
He returned to Bismarck and went through a recovery program in 2016.
Since then, 'I have dedicated myself to community,' Grueneich said.
Two other North Dakota also were awarded a Bush Fellowship.
Sarah Dixon-Hackey of West Fargo will pursue certification in suicide prevention skills, expand her expertise in digital media, and deepen her research into cultural disparities in care, according to a news release. She has created storytelling projects with college students and produced podcasts for refugee families to amplify underrepresented voices, especially on the topic of mental health.
Richard Pallay III of Fargo has used his experience as a DJ to found the cultural initiative WEAREONE. He also launched Soul Dads, a peer support network for Black fathers that blends mentorship with creative expression. Pallay will use his Bush Fellowship to launch a statewide artist network and scale Soul Dads into a model that can be replicated, the news release said.
Grueneich chairs the North Dakota HIV Advisory Board while working in state government. He has worked for the Department of Transportation for the past five years and is operations manager for the driver's license division.
After founding Shine Bright and Live in January, Grueneich spent time at the Capitol advocating for the repeal of a state law that makes it a felony to willfully transfer body fluid containing the HIV virus.
Rep. Gretchen Dobervich, D-Fargo, sponsored House Bill 1217 that repeals the law.
She said the law singled out HIV from other infectious diseases by creating the felony crime and discouraged people from getting tested for HIV, leading to the potential spread of the virus.
The law, 'had the opposite effect of what it was intended,' Dobervich said.
She said Grueneich was instrumental in getting the bill through the Legislature.
'He was able to make the issue real,' Dobervich said.
Testifying in front of a legislative committee was new for him, Grueneich said.
'A leader faces fears,' Grueneich said. 'Somebody living with HIV, standing in front of the Legislature numerous times when there's a lot of stigma about HIV can be daunting.'
In his testimony, Gruenich cited President Donald Trump, who in his first term in 2019, used the State of the Union address to announce a plan to end the HIV epidemic.
Grueneich said it was a way to find common ground on HIV issues.
'Unfortunately, we see now the administration is cutting funding for HIV prevention. It's cutting funding for the years of work we've had on finding HIV vaccination or care,' he said.
Grueneich said one way he hopes to benefit from the Bush Fellowship is learning how to deal with traumatic life experiences that come with working with high-risk communities such as HIV and recovery.
'You're continually working through trauma and loss,' Grueneich said. 'I want to learn how to heal and process those losses, so I can teach others how they can process that and then refill their cups so they can keep doing the work that's necessary.'
Editor's note: The North Dakota Monitor is a recipient of funding from the Bush Foundation through its media partnership program.
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Based on what he's seen so far, he has a number of ideas about what could be happening. In particular, it appears that boys are more likely to better control the virus due to a quirk of gender biology to do with the innate immune system, the body's first-line defense against pathogens. 'The female innate immune system both in utero and in childhood is much more aggressive than the male equivalent when it encounters and senses viruses like HIV,' says Goulder. 'Usually that's a good thing, but because HIV infects activated immune cells, it actually seems to make girls more vulnerable to being infected.' In addition, Goulder notes that because female fetuses share the same innate immune system as their mothers, the virus transmitted to them is an HIV strain that has become resistant to the female innate immune response. There could also be other explanations for the long-lasting suppression seen in some children. In some cases, Goulder has observed that the transmitted strain of HIV has been weakened through needing to undergo changes to circumvent the mother's adaptive immune response, the part of the immune system which learns to target specific viruses and other pathogens. He has also noted that male infants experience particularly large surges of testosterone in the first six months of life—a period known as 'mini-puberty'—which can enhance their immune system in various ways that help them fight the virus. Such revelations are particularly tantalizing as HIV researchers are starting to get access to a far more potent toolbox of therapeutics. Leading the way are so-called bNAbs, or broadly neutralizing antibodies, which have the ability to recognize and fight many different strains of HIV, as well as stimulating the immune system to destroy cells where HIV is hiding. There are also a growing number of therapeutic vaccines in development that can train the immune system's T cells to target and destroy HIV reservoirs. Children tend to respond to various vaccines better than adults, and Goulder says that if some children are already proving relatively adept at controlling the virus on the back of standard antiretrovirals, these additional therapeutics could give them the additional assistance they need to eradicate HIV altogether. In the coming years, this is set to be tested in several clinical trials. Cotton is leading the most ambitious attempt, which will see HIV-infected children receive a combination of antiretroviral therapy, three bNAbs, and a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, while in a separate trial, Goulder is examining the potential of a different bNAb together with antiretrovirals to see whether it can help more children achieve long-term remission. 'We think that adding the effects of these broadly neutralizing antibodies to antiretrovirals will help us chip away at what is needed to achieve a cure,' says Goulder. 'It's a little bit like with leukemia, where treatments have steadily improved, and now the outlook for most children affected is incredibly good. Realistically in most cases, curing HIV probably requires a few hits from different angles, impacting the way that the virus can grow, and tackling it with different immune responses at the same time to essentially force it into a cul-de-sac that it can't escape from.' Children are also being viewed as the ideal target population for an even more ambitious experimental treatment, a one-time gene therapy that delivers instructions directing the body's own muscle cells to produce a continuous stream of bNAbs, without the need for repeated infusions. Maurico Martins, an associate professor at the University of Florida, who is pioneering this new approach, feels that it could represent a particularly practical strategy for low-income countries where HIV transmission to children is particularly rife, and mothers often struggle to keep their children on repeated medication. 'In regions like Uganda or parts of South Africa where this is very prevalent, you could also give this therapy to a baby right after birth as a preventative measure, protecting the newborn child against acquisition of HIV through breastfeeding and maybe even through sexual intercourse later in life,' says Martins. While Martins also hopes that gene therapy could benefit HIV-infected adults in future, he feels it has more of a chance of initially succeeding in children because their nascent immune systems are less likely to launch what he calls an anti-drug response that can destroy the therapeutic bNAbs. 'It's very difficult for most antibodies to recognize the HIV envelope protein because it's buried deep within a sugar coat,' says Martins. 'To overcome that, these bNAbs carry a lot of mutations and extensions to their arms which allow them to penetrate that sugar coat. But the problem then is that they're often viewed by your own immune system as foreign, and it starts making these anti-bNAb antibodies.' But when Martins tested the therapy in newborn rhesus macaques, it was far more effective. 'We found that the first few days or two weeks after birth comprised a sort of sweet spot for this gene therapy,' he says. 'And that's why this could really work very well in treating and preventing pediatric HIV infections.' Like many HIV scientists, Martins has run into recent funding challenges, with a previous commitment from the National Institutes of Health to support a clinical trial of the novel therapy in HIV-infected children being withdrawn. However, he is hoping that the trial will still go ahead. 'We're now talking with the Gates Foundation to see whether they can sponsor it,' he says. While children still comprise the minority of overall HIV infections, being able to cure them may yield further insights that help with the wider goal of an overall curative therapy. 'We can learn a lot from them because they are different,' says Goulder. 'I think we can learn how to achieve a cure in kids if we continue along this pathway, and from there, that will have applications in adults as well.'
