Priscilla Chan, an American pediatrician and philanthropist, was born on February 24, 1985. She is well-known for her work in healthcare, education, and scientific progress.
As the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), she has been a key figure in directing billions of dollars toward fighting diseases, improving education, and fixing social problems.
Chan is married to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms. She has kept a low public profile, but she has had a big impact through her work and charitable work.
She is 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm) tall and an American citizen. Her personal net worth is not made public, but it is linked to her husband’s estimated fortune, most of which is promised to charity.
Life and Schooling in the BeginningPriscilla Chan was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, to Chinese parents who had fled Vietnam.
Chan’s father owned a restaurant when she was a child, but in 2006 he switched to running a wholesale fish company. Chan and her two younger sisters, Michelle and Elaine, dealt with the problems of being an immigrant.
She spoke Cantonese well enough to be an interpreter for her grandparents, which gave her a strong sense of duty from a young age.
Chan did very well in school. She graduated as the valedictorian of Quincy High School, where her classmates called her “Class Genius.”
She was involved in a lot of activities outside of school, like being the captain of the tennis team and competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition.
She was the first person in her family to go to college, and she got a full scholarship to Harvard.
At first, Chan felt out of place, but after volunteering with poor kids through the Franklin Afterschool Enrichment program, she decided to become a pediatrician.
She got her Bachelor of Science in biology in 2007.
After Harvard, Chan taught science to 4th and 5th graders at the Harker School in San Jose, California, for a year. Then she went to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
She got her Doctor of Medicine degree in 2012 and finished her residency in pediatrics at UCSF in 2015.
Career in MedicineChan’s work as a pediatrician was influenced by her time caring for people in underserved areas.
She worked at San Francisco General Hospital from 2015 to 2017, where she saw firsthand how hard it is for low-income families to get medical care.
This job made her even more determined to combine medicine with other social support systems.
Even though she stopped working full-time in a clinical setting, her medical background still helps her with her charitable work, especially health-related projects.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and giving to charityPriscilla Chan’s charitable work has made a big difference. By 2025, she and Zuckerberg will have given about $4.6 billion to different causes.
In 2015, they gave $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital and $120 million to public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 2013, they gave the Silicon Valley Community Foundation 18 million Facebook shares, worth more than $970 million. This made them the most generous donors of the year, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
In December 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). They promised 99% of their Meta shares, which were worth $45 billion at the time, to help people reach their full potential and promote equality.
As co-CEO, Chan is in charge of the company’s daily operations. He is working on biomedical research, education, and technology to find cures, prevent diseases, or manage them all by the end of the century.
Some of the most important things that have happened are $500 million for affordable housing in California, $300 million for AI-driven health research, and almost $5 billion in grants by 2025.
In 2016, Chan started The Primary School in East Palo Alto. It is a free school that combines K-12 education with prenatal care, early childhood programs, and primary healthcare for families that don’t have enough of these services.
It got about $8 million in 2022 and $4 million in 2023, but in April 2025, CZI said it would close at the end of the 2025–2026 school year because it didn’t have enough money. It promised $50 million for community programs over five years.
Chan was the board chair emeritus and was nominated for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Visionary of the Year award in 2017 for her new ideas.
Life Outside of WorkIn 2003, Chan met Mark Zuckerberg at a Harvard fraternity party during her first year of college.
They got married in a private ceremony on May 19, 2012, the day after Facebook went public.
Maxima (born in 2015), August (born in 2017), and Aurelia (born in 2023) are the couple’s three daughters.
Chan first identified as a Buddhist, but by 2023 he had changed to Judaism.
In 2024, Zuckerberg showed off a 7-foot-tall statue of Chan made of stainless steel and oxidized copper by artist Daniel Arsham. The statue got a lot of media attention.
Chan prefers to stay out of the spotlight, even though her husband is famous. She doesn’t use social media and stays out of the public eye.
He has said in public that she is “the most important person in my life.”
New Things That Have HappenedChan’s charitable work has changed since 2025. CZI is no longer giving out grants for things like social inequality, criminal justice reform, immigration, housing, and education. Instead, it is focusing on scientific research.
This includes getting rid of the DEI team and cutting support for groups in the Bay Area, which some people think is because of political reasons, like wanting to be like President Donald Trump.
Chan and Zuckerberg went to Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, where they sat with other tech leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
It seems that her public role is moving away from her previous progressive views, but she is still in charge of CZI’s work on AI and biomedical progress.
These changes show how priorities are changing in a world after “woke,” which may be because of Meta’s legal problems.
