14:03, 13 March 2026
Words by Cheyanne Bryan, Editorial and Campaign Marketing Executive, London
“Education is an incredibly personal issue for me… If you’re the first generation to go to college, sometimes you don’t realise your potential until others point it out.” — Priscilla Chan
For this Friday’s Philanthropy feature, we focus on Priscilla Chan, an American paediatrician and philanthropist often recognised publicly as the wife of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive and co-founder of Meta Platforms.
In a 2017 Vox article , they dubbed Priscilla as running one of the most ambitious philanthropies in the world — and that is not something to be taken as a light comment.
Priscilla Chan was born in 1985 in Braintree, Massachusetts and raised nearby in Quincy, Massachusetts. Her parents were Chinese-Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam by boat before eventually settling in the United States.
Growing up in an immigrant household, Priscilla often helped translate for her Cantonese-speaking grandparents while her parents ran a small family business.
A high-achieving student, she graduated as valedictorian of Quincy High School before attending Harvard University, where she studied biology. Chan was the first in her family to graduate from university, an experience that would later shape her commitment to expanding educational opportunity.
After graduating in 2007, Priscilla moved to San Jose, California, where she worked as a science teacher at a local school serving disadvantaged communities. The experience exposed her to the challenges many families face in accessing both education and healthcare.
She later enrolled at the University of California, San Francisco, training as a doctor and specialising in paediatrics. Working with children from low-income backgrounds reinforced her belief that improving health outcomes often requires addressing broader social issues such as housing, education and family stability.
In 2015, Chan and Zuckerberg launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with a mission to “advance human potential and promote equality”. The initiative focuses primarily on science and education, funding projects that aim to improve learning systems, support communities and accelerate research into curing or preventing disease.
The organisation’s ambition is vast. Early on, CZI announced a long-term goal of helping cure, prevent or manage all diseases within the lifetime of today’s children.
While many first learned her name through Silicon Valley, Priscilla Chan’s influence increasingly comes from her work in medicine, education and global philanthropy — using resources and research to tackle some of society’s most complex challenges.
