Priscilla Chan

Chan holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and a Doctor of Medicine from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she also completed her residency in pediatrics.⁠[1]

Chan graduated as valedictorian of her public high school and was the first in her family to attend college; before her medical career she worked in a neuroscience lab. After moving west to teach science, she started medical school at UCSF a year later, and later entered a competitive UCSF program for pediatric residents who want to help vulnerable children.⁠[2]

On December 1, 2015, Chan and Mark Zuckerberg announced the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in a public letter to their daughter, writing: “We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to advance this mission.” The letter named areas including personalized learning, curing disease, connecting underserved people to the internet and building healthy communities.⁠[3]

On September 21, 2016, Chan and Zuckerberg announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative would commit $3 billion over ten years to scientific research, framed by the question: “Can we help scientists to cure, prevent or manage all diseases within our children's lifetime?” The first project was BiohubBiohubBiohub is a research organization combining artificial intelligence and experimental biology, founded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg.Open the full entry, a $600 million research hub linking Stanford, UCSF and UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry; neuroscientist and geneticist Cori Bargmann joined to lead the science effort.⁠[4]

As of February 2020, Chan and Zuckerberg were officially co-CEOs of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with Chan as the full-time leader and key day-to-day decision-maker of the roughly 400-person organization; after leaving full-time clinical practice, she had returned to the clinic at UCSF to practice about once a month. Of the $3 billion pledged for science over a decade in 2016, about $800 million had been granted by then.⁠[2]

On November 6, 2025, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released the episode “Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease” of The a16z Show, hosted by Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben HorowitzBen HorowitzBen Horowitz is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and business author who co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Marc Andreessen in 2009. He previously led Loudcloud’s transition into Opsware and its 2007 sale to Hewlett-Packard. His writing and investing address startup management, organizational culture and the relationship between technology and cultural industries.Open the full entry and general partner Erik TorenbergErik TorenbergErik Torenberg is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and podcast host who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests and is responsible for marketing and the ecosystem network. He was the first employee of Product Hunt and founded or co-founded On Deck, Village Global, and Turpentine, long combining founder communities, expert content, and early-stage investing.Open the full entry with a16z’s Vineeta AgarwalaVineeta AgarwalaVineeta Agarwala is a physician-turned-venture investor and a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).Open the full entry, featuring Chan and Mark Zuckerberg.⁠[5][6]

The episode discussed the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s work on computational tools to cure, prevent and manage disease: basic science projects on the scale of $100 million that traditional NIH grants do not typically fund; the Cell Atlas, an open-source catalog of millions of cells likened to a periodic table for biology; virtual cell models that let scientists test risky hypotheses computationally before costly wet-lab work; and Biohub’s reorganization under AI leadership, collaboration between biologists and engineers, and labs investing in compute rather than physical space.⁠[5][6]

As co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Chan leads its efforts to advance biomedical research and technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence, building research tools and funding science, aiming to help scientists “cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of this century.” Her firsthand experience caring for patients drives her commitment to accelerating scientific discovery.⁠[1]

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: Official website: https://chanzuckerberg.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]