Pediatrician, ex-teacher keeps focus on children
Chan helps develop fund with Zuckerberg
Priscilla Chan was just a few years into marriage when she and her husband decided it was time to fulfill a promise they’d made together, quietly, long ago — to build a multibilliondollar philanthropy serving children and families.
Chan was newly pregnant and not long out of her pediatric residency at San Francisco General Hospital. Her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, was busy running Facebook.
“It was like, ‘Mark, it’s not good timing to launch something, with a newborn,’ ” Chan said with a laugh.
But they were young and eager, and the prospect of starting a family was propelling them with new urgency.
So, a year and a half ago, they founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropy focused on science and education that they will fund with 99 percent of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes.
The initiative’s first major goal, to which the couple has committed $3 billion over 10 years, is a grand one: to cure, treat or prevent all human diseases within their daughter’s lifetime.
Chan is also chief executive officer of a separate project called the Primary School, an experiment in bringing together health care and education under one roof.
And she remains a practicing pediatrician at San Francisco General — in a building that now officially bears her name, due to a $75 million donation: the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
For her philanthropic work, Chan was nominated for a 2017 Visionary of the Year award, sponsored by The Chronicle and the School of Economics and Business Administration at St. Mary’s College.
Chan, 32, admits she is probably naive to be setting out on this kind of work. But it’s going to take decades — a lifetime, even — and a lot of failures mingled with successes to make the world a better place for their daughter and her generation.
Baby Max is 15 months old now, and Chan and Zuckerberg have another daughter due this fall. Becoming a mother has only intensified her drive, Chan said.
“It feels very urgent and personal, not only because of my daughter, but because of how universal that must feel. After Max, I feel so deeply for all these families and children,” Chan said, tearing up — later, chuckling, she admitted she’s a crier — “It’s very raw for me.”
Sitting in a nondescript conference room at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Palo Alto headquarters, Chan doesn’t come across as Silicon Valley royalty. She’s dressed casually, in slacks and a comfortable sweater, her hair pulled into a ponytail.
And though she’s had five years to adjust to the kind of offbeat celebrity that comes from being married to Zuckerberg, she’s a private person by nature. She’s uninterested in the spotlight, even as she accepts that it could help draw attention to her work.
After graduating from Harvard, where she met Zuckerberg while they were undergraduates, Chan briefly was a science teacher before shifting to medicine in 2008. Recently she’s had to scale way back on her pediatric work to focus on the initiative and The Primary School.
As a teacher and a doctor, Chan found herself running into one barrier after another that prevented her from fully serving her students and patients. Health problems kept kids from doing well in her classroom, but later, as a doctor, Chan could do only so much to help them outside her exam room.
Now, by virtue of her wealth and experience, she believes she can put major resources behind programs that could overcome some of those barriers.
To call the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s goal to cure all diseases ambitious would be an understatement, and when the couple announced their plan in September, they were met with both awe and mild mockery — surely they were overreaching, some said.
But Chan stands by the goal. The initiative alone won’t cure all diseases, she notes. The idea is more about creating a mind-set — about “lifting all boats,” she said.
“The way I understand it, this is a challenge for all of us as humans,” said Brian Pinkerton, chief technology officer with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “Bringing a huge amount of resources personally to the project, that’s just step one. Step two: How do you inspire the world to solve these problems with them?”
One of the first major grantees of the initiative is the Biohub, an independent research center based in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood that connects scientists from Stanford, UCSF and UC Berkeley who are working on high-risk, high-reward research. The Biohub has provided grants to 47 scientists so far.
The Biohub also has its own research projects, including one focused on global infectious disease control and another called the Cell Atlas, which involves mapping all the cells in the human body.
“The pressing problems are incredibly clear to Priscilla, who has been knee-deep in it,” said Joseph DeRisi, a UCSF biochemist who, along with Stanford bioengineer Stephen Quake, runs the Biohub. “That gives her a unique perspective, and it provides the kind of juice, the electricity, the energy to do something about it.”
The bulk of Chan’s
week is spent at the initiative’s offices, where she has overseen everything from hiring to quarterly planning and budgeting. She also helped design the layout of the work space and assigned desks. “Probably not the best use of my time,” she said with a smile, “but it was important to me, and someone had to do it.”
A day or two are also spent at The Primary School, in East Palo Alto, where the first three kindergarten classes started last fall. The school has a partnership with a community health clinic, and teachers and doctors are in regular communication about students’ needs.
The Primary School is clearly Chan’s pet project. She enjoys getting to “nerd out and learn” from the scientists involved with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Chan said. But her personal experiences — as a doctor and teacher, and as a student — make the school dear to her, she said.
Chan grew up outside Boston, the eldest of three
daughters of Chinese refugees who fled Vietnam. Her parents encouraged her to do well in school, and it was understood she’d go to college. But she was the first in her family to go, and she relied on teachers and other mentors to help her succeed where her parents could not.
It was only after she got to Harvard that she realized her family had been poor, and that she’d lacked many of the opportunities afforded her more privileged peers. When she signed up to volunteer to tutor kids in poorer neighborhoods near the university, she saw that she’d been one of those kids.
“I’m here because I got lucky,” Chan said. She doesn’t want the next generation of children — Max and her sister, and the kids they grow up with — to need luck.