Fullilove was born to Robert Fullilove, a physician, and Helen Fullilove. Fullilove's grandfather was from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and was one of the first Black physicians in the area. Fullilove attended the Pingry School. In 1966, he earned a B.A. in philosophy and religion from Colgate University. In 1972, Fullilove earned a M.S. in instructional technology from Syracuse University. In 1984, Fullilove earned Ed.D. in higher and adult education and statistics from the Teachers College, Columbia University, where he studied the educational opportunities of students in New Jersey.
Career
While in college, Fullilove was part of voter registration efforts in Mississippi as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. In 1969 Fullilove joined the faculty State University of New York cooperative college centre, before moving to the University of California, Berkeley as a research associate. Fullilove started working on HIV/AIDS prevention in the 1980s, when 1 in 5 of Americans living with HIV were African American. As the HIV spread around the United States, Nixon's creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration meant that people of colour were disproportionately being locked up in prison. Fullilove has argued that drug abuse is first and foremost a public health challenge, and should not be treated as a criminal justice issue. By locking up people who were most likely to suffer from HIV, the spread of HIV/AIDS accelerated both in prisons and in the communities that prisoners returned to. Fullilove has argued that society, and particularly mass incarceration, allowed HIV/AIDS to disproportionally impact people from minority backgrounds. In 1995 he joined the National Academy of Medicine on the Board of the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention committee. He has served on various committees for the National Academy of Medicine, including those which focus on substance abuse and addition. He joined Columbia University in 1990 and was promoted to Professor of Sociomedical Sciences in 2004. From 2010 he started to teach public health in several New York State prisons through the Bard College Prison Initiative. Whilst the programme started with only 15 students, by 2015 there were almost 300 registered each year. He has continued to suppor the programme throughout his career, eventually being made a Senior Advisor. Looking back on a decade of the initiative, Fullilove said "the success of this program in creating college graduates committed to pursuing careers in public health cannot be underestimated". During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fullilove became concerned that coronavirus disease would easily be transmitted around prisons and homeless shelters.
