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Energy Engagement Programs is a cross-campus effort of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

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Marc Tessier-Lavigne

President Emeritus, Stanford University

Marc Tessier-Lavigne is Stanford University’s eleventh president. He stepped into his current role in September of 2016 after having served five years as President of The Rockefeller University in New York City where he was an active and visible leader in growing the New York bioscience community and worked with city government and the private sector to stimulate development of the city’s still nascent biopharmaceutical sector. At a national and international level, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has been an active spokesperson for societal support of science, through editorials, advocacy and congressional testimony. He has held faculty positions at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and subsequently at Stanford University. While at UCSF and Stanford he was also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and his colleagues pioneered the identification of molecules that direct the formation of connections among nerve cells to establish circuits in the developing brain and spinal cord. His contributions have been recognized by numerous prizes and honors, including his election as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine (USA), and a fellow of the Royal Society (UK), the Royal Society of Canada, the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a Rhodes Scholar. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne serves on several scientific advisory, non-profit, and corporate boards, including the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  He has also co-founded two start-up companies targeting neurological disease (Renovis) and neurodegenerative disease (Denali). He was executive vice president for research and chief scientific officer at Genentech where he directed 1,400 scientists in disease research and drug discovery for cancer, immune disorders, infectious diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases while maintaining an active research laboratory.