Feb. 04--Neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne will become the 11th president of Stanford University, returning to the school where he served on the faculty in the early 2000s.
The Stanford Board of Trustees said Tessier-Lavigne would take the helm from John L. Hennessy, who announced his intention to step down from the post last year. Hennessy has led the Palo Alto university for 16 years.
Tessier-Lavigne is currently the president of Rockefeller University in New York City, a position he has held since 2011. He will begin his new job at Stanford on Sept. 1.
"I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to build on the remarkable legacy of John Hennessy," Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement. "It will be a privilege to rejoin the Stanford community and to lead this extraordinary institution."
The scientist and administrator was backed by all 19 members of Stanford's Presidential Search Committee. The Board of Trustees approved the hire in a unanimous vote Thursday morning.
Steve Denning, chairman of the Stanford Board of Trustees, called Tessier-Lavigne "an exemplary leader" with "a distinguished academic record and a lifetime immersed in leading initiatives to develop knowledge for the benefit of humanity."
Tessier-Lavigne began his academic career up the road from Stanford at UC San Francisco, joining the anatomy faculty there in 1991. He earned tenure as a full professor and won teaching honors along the way.
He decamped to Stanford in 2001 after being personally recruited by Hennessy. In Palo Alto, Tessier-Lavigne was a professor of biological sciences. Two years later, he went on leave to join the biotechnology company Genentech Inc. as its senior vice president of research drug discovery.
Tessier-Lavigne joined Genentech full time in 2005 and became the company's chief scientific officer in 2009. He stayed in that role until 2011, when he became president of Rockefeller University.
Unlike Stanford, which enrolled 6,999 undergraduate students alongside 9,771 graduate students in the fall of 2015, Rockefeller is exclusively focused on graduate education and research. The 115-year-old university on Manhattan's Upper East Side maintains 77 research laboratories in biomedical sciences, bioinformatics and physics. One of them is headed by Tessier-Lavigne, who studies embryonic brain development and how cells in the brain respond to damage wrought by trauma or disease, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Rockefeller's current faculty boasts five Nobel laureates, seven Albert Lasker Award winners and three recipients of the National Medal of Science, among other honors.
Tessier-Lavigne was born in Ontario, Canada, and grew up mostly in Europe. He graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1980 with a degree in physics and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he studied philosophy and physiology. He earned his PhD in physiology from University College London in 1987. He came to the United States to become a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University.
The 56-year-old scientist and administrator has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Societies of the United Kingdom and Canada.
Tessier-Lavigne has testified to Congress about the importance of federal funding for scientific research.
He also has a track record of launching start-up companies. His first biotech company, Renovis, was acquired by the German firm Evotech in 2008. Last year he co-founded Denali Therapeutics in South San Francisco to develop drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases.
Tessier-Lavigne's wife, neuroscientist Mary Hynes, was a researcher at Stanford from 2003 to 2011 before moving her lab to Rockefeller. The couple still has a home on the peninsula. They have three children.
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