Anne Wojcicki


Anne E. Wojcicki is an American entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of the personal genomics company 23andMe.

Early life

Wojcicki, the youngest of three daughters, was born in Palo Alto, California. Her parents are Esther Wojcicki, an educator of Russian-Jewish descent, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish-born physics professor emeritus at Stanford University. Her two sisters are Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube and a former executive at Google, and Janet Wojcicki, anthropologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus. When she was two, she learned how to figure skate, and later started playing ice hockey. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and was an editor for The Oracle, the school newspaper, and won a scholarship for her sports stories.

Education

Wojcicki attended Yale University, where she was a competitive ice skater and played on the varsity women's ice hockey team. She graduated with a B.S. in biology in 1996. She did molecular biology research at the National Institutes of Health and the University of California, San Diego.

Career

After graduating, Wojcicki worked as a health care consultant at Passport Capital, a San Francisco-based investment fund and at Investor AB. She was a health care investment analyst for 4 years, overseeing health care investments, focusing on biotechnology companies. Disillusioned by the culture of Wall Street and its attitude towards health care, she quit in 2000, intending to take the MCAT and enroll in medical school. Instead, she decided to focus on research.
In 2006, she co-founded 23andMe with Linda Avey. 23andMe is a privately held personal genomics and biotechnology company, based in Sunnyvale, California, that provides genetic testing. The company is named for the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a normal human cell. The company's personal genome test kit was named "Invention of the Year" by Time magazine in 2008. From 2015, the FDA started to give approval to 23andMe's health-related tests, including risk from cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, certain cancers, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and coeliac disease. In 2018, 23andMe entered into a four-year collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline to develop new medicines.
Wojcicki is also a member of the Xconomists, an ad hoc team of editorial advisors for the tech news and media company, Xconomy. In October 2013, Fast Company named Wojcicki "The Most Daring CEO". She is a co-founder and board member of the Breakthrough Prize.

Personal life

Wojcicki married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in May 2007. They have a son, Benji Wojin, born in December 2008, and a daughter, Chloe Wojin, born in late 2011. Wojcicki is not religious. The couple stopped living together in 2013, and they divorced in 2015.
Her grandfather, :pl:Franciszek_Wójcicki|Franciszek Wójcicki, was a People's Party and Polish People's Party politician who had been elected MP during the Polish legislative election, 1947. Her grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress who was responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the United States.