How Did I Get Here?

Sue Desmond-Hellmann

Chief executive officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
from
  • Education
  • Bishop Manogue Catholic High School, Reno, Nev., class of 1975
  • University of Nevada at Reno, class of 1978
  • University of Nevada at Reno School of Medicine, class of 1982
  • University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, class of 1989
  • Work Experience
  • 1982–89
    Chief resident of internal medicine, assistant clinical professor of AIDS and oncology, University of California at San Francisco
  • 1989–91
    Visiting faculty member, Uganda Cancer Institute
  • 1991–93
    Private practice oncologist, Lexington Oncology Associates, Kentucky
  • 1993–94
    Associate director of clinical oncology, Bristol-Myers Squibb
  • 1995–2009
    Chief medical officer, president, Genentech
  • 2009–14
    Chancellor, UCSF
  • 2014–Present
    CEO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Life Lessons
  • “Always be in learning-and-listening mode.”
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  • “You shouldn’t be a manager if it doesn’t make you excited when someone you coached behind the scenes succeeds.”
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  • With her six siblings (top row, second from left), 1976
    “I had a sister a year older and a sister a year younger, so we just had a great time.”
  • “My husband and I went together. He’s an infectious disease doctor. I was studying AIDS and Kaposi sarcoma, and I took care of the patients in the adult cancer ward.”
  • In Kampala, 1989
  • “When I left my patients [at Lexington], I felt so awful. I committed to them that I would do whatever I could. I got to work on the approval of Taxol for breast cancer.”
  • With a Genentech employee and her daughter, 2008
    “I worked on drugs that are now important cancer drugs: Rituxan, Herceptin, Avastin, Tarceva.”
  • “There’s shared governance with the faculty, so there’s a lot of consultation. Coming from a more classical company hierarchy increased the challenges of being a chancellor.”
  • “I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but it involved a lot of coordination, and I do not have magic hands.”
  • “We were all consumed with HIV/AIDS. I discovered six months after I left that all my patients had died. It had a profound impact on me, that sense of needing to do better.”
  • Receiving an award from Cal’s alumni association, 2012
  • “What I love about the foundation is its doggedness to innovate so that things get better. It’s about a $40 billion endowment, with 1,400 employees. In 2015, $4 billion was given away.”
  • Giving a TED Talk in Vancouver, 2016