Marc Tessier-Lavigne


Marc Trevor Tessier-Lavigne is a Canadian neuroscientist who is the 11th and current president of Stanford University. Previously, he was a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and then president of Rockefeller University in New York City. He was formerly executive vice president for research and the Chief Scientific Officer at Genentech. He was the first industry executive to assume the Rockefeller presidency. He is also a member of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund's Scientific Advisory Board.

Early life

Tessier-Lavigne was born in Trenton, Ontario. He grew up in Europe from ages 7 to 17, where his father was serving with NATO as part of the Canadian Armed Forces. He was the first in his family to go to college. He earned his first undergraduate degree at McGill University, where he majored in physics and attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he "first encountered the nervous system and fell in love with it" and earned a B.A. in philosophy and physiology. Tessier-Lavigne was awarded a doctorate in physiology at University College London with David Attwell. He did his postdoctoral work at Columbia University with Thomas Jessell.

Career

Tessier-Lavigne started his career at the University of California, San Francisco from 1991 to 2001 and at Stanford University starting in 2001. He was hired by Genentech in 2003 as its senior vice president of Research Drug Discovery. He cited the firm's "potential to create breakthrough therapies for unmet medical needs" as his reason for leaving academia. His research on the development of the brain has uncovered details of how Alzheimer's disease is triggered.
In 2011 Tessier-Lavigne joined Rockefeller University as its 10th president, succeeding Paul Nurse, who returned to Britain to take over as president of the Royal Society. Rockefeller University called Tessier-Lavigne, who supervised a team of 1,400 researchers, the "Board's unanimous first choice for the position". He would be the first high-ranking science employee to leave Genentech following its acquisition by Roche in March 2009. The departure of Tessier-Lavigne from Genentech raised concerns that the company — described by The New York Times as being "among the most innovative and successful biotechnology companies in the world" — would see a negative effect on its scientific culture. Tessier-Lavigne stated that his choice to leave Genentech was unrelated to the Roche merger and that "this is probably the only job that could have lured me away from Genentech." Russell L. Carson, chairman of the board of trustees at Rockefeller University, said that he had "literally called him cold" to offer him the position and that Tessier-Lavigne had the strong scientific background needed to oversee the 70 independent laboratories that operate within the university and whose heads report directly to the president. Richard Scheller, Tessier-Lavigne's superior, called the move "part of the tradition of exchange between academia and Genentech." While it was too early to discuss specific goals, Tessier-Lavigne said that he hoped to work on transforming basic science into treatments for disease.
Tessier-Lavigne is also a member of the Xconomists, an ad hoc team of editorial advisors for the tech news and media company, Xconomy.
On February 4, 2016, Stanford University announced that Tessier-Lavigne would become Stanford's 11th president, succeeding John L. Hennessy.

Honors

Marc met his wife Mary Hynes as postdocs at Columbia. They have three children, Christian, Kyle, and Ella.