Shirley M. Tilghman

Who is Shirley M. Tilghman?

Shirley M. Tilghman was elected Princeton University's 19th

president on May 5, 2001, and assumed office on June 15, 2001. An

exceptional teacher and a world-renowned scholar and leader in the

field of molecular biology, she served on the Princeton faculty for 15

years before being named president.

Tilghman, a native of Canada, received her Honors B.Sc. in chemistry

from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1968. After two years

of secondary school teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she obtained

her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia.

During postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health,

she made a number of groundbreaking discoveries while participating in

cloning the first mammalian gene, and then continued to make scientific

breakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute for

Cancer Research in Philadelphia and an adjunct associate professor of

human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of

Pennsylvania.

Tilghman came to Princeton in 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor

of the Life Sciences. Two years later, she also joined the Howard

Hughes Medical Institute as an investigator. In 1998, she took on

additional responsibilities as the founding director of Princeton's

multi-disciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

A member of the National Research Council's committee that set the

blueprint for the U.S. effort in the Human Genome Project, Tilghman

also was one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council

of the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of Health.

She is renowned not only for her pioneering research, but for her

national leadership on behalf of women in science and for promoting

efforts to make the early careers of young scientists as meaningful and

productive as possible.

From 1993 through 2000, Tilghman chaired Princeton's Council on

Science and Technology, which encourages the teaching of science and

technology to students outside the sciences, and in 1996 she received

Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. She initiated

the Princeton Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship, a program across all

the science and engineering disciplines that brings postdoctoral

students to Princeton each year to gain experience in both research and

teaching.

In 2002, Tilghman was one of five winners of the L'Oréal-UNESCO

Award for Women in Science. In the following year, shereceived the

Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Developmental Biology,

and in 2007, she was awarded the Genetics Society of America Medal for

outstanding contributions to her field.

Tilghman is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the

National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the Royal

Society of London. She serves as a trustee of The Jackson Laboratory,

the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a director of

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