Not only is Priscilla Chan the wife of tech executive Mark Zuckerberg, but she is also a licensed pediatrician, a teacher who founded her own school, and one of the most influential and intriguing philanthropists of our time.
Born in 1985 to immigrants, she grew up in the suburbs of Boston. She attended Harvard University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and met her future husband and founder of Facebook.
She then received her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, before completing her pediatrics residency at the UCSF Medical Center in 2015.
After working as an educator and pediatrician at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, renamed as such after the couple donated $75 million, she decided in 2016 to co-found and chair a tuition-free private school, “The Primary School,” which attempts to integrate education and health care to better serve low-income families.
Earlier, in the late 2015, she co-founded, along with her husband, the “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” one of the largest philanthropic investment companies in the world. The “power couple” has committed to donate 99% of their lifetime Facebook shares to charitable purposes. “We - the current generation - have a moral responsibility to make the world better for future generations,” she once stated.
The organization, better known as CZI, aims to use technology to address the toughest societal challenges such as preventing and eradicating disease, improving education, and reforming the criminal justice system.
As an example, last December it committed $7 million to several community organizations with the ambition to help advance racial equity and support youth well-being in communities impacted hardest by the pandemic.
Earlier this year, Chan joined the “California Black Freedom Fund”, a $100 million, five-year initiative whose objective is to provide resources to Black-led organizations seeking to eradicate systemic and institutional racism.
As such, her overall mission is to make the world a better place. By running such a prominent philanthropic organization and constantly giving back to the community, she is without doubt one of the most influential women in the world.
“I just think that philanthropy is a fancy way to say that you care about others and that you want to serve others. And that's been a part of me for as long as I can remember.” she once humbly said.