Priscilla Chan

Priscilla Chan (born 1985), the Harvard-educated daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, practiced as a pediatrician before co-founding the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 with her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, pledging 99% of their Meta shares to it. CZI’s signature moonshot — to help science cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century — is hers as much as his, rooted in her clinical years treating children with untreatable conditions.

The virtual cell

In September 2023 CZI announced one of philanthropy’s largest AI investments: a high-performance cluster of over a thousand GPUs to train generative models not on text but on biological data. The goal is a “virtual cell” — AI that can simulate human cells well enough to predict how they respond to infection, mutation or medication, letting researchers run experiments in silico before touching a wet lab.

By 2025 the bet was producing artifacts: CZI’s Biohub network began releasing early virtual-cell models trained on massive single-cell datasets, and Chan told interviewers AI could move medicine from treating disease “when it’s out of control” to preventing it at the earliest stages. CZI reorganized to put science and AI at its center — a shift that drew criticism in early 2025 as the initiative wound down diversity and social-advocacy programs it had once funded, with some grantees accusing the couple of retreating to safer, tech-flavored ground.

Chan’s public case for AI is unusually specific for a philanthropist: not productivity or chatbots, but rare-disease diagnosis and cell-level prediction — the places where compute might substitute for decades of bench work.