Board of Directors
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David Sanford
Founder, CEO, and Board Member
Hypothesis FundDavid founded the Hypothesis Fund in 2022 to support breakthrough research that increases our adaptability against systemic risks to the health of humans and the planet.
Prior to launching the Hypothesis Fund, David was Chief of Staff in the Office of Reid Hoffman, responsible for managing a broad portfolio of philanthropic, civic, business, and intellectual initiatives.
He has served as a Board Observer at Change.org and on numerous nonprofit and company advisory boards.
David has pioneered community building both in the digital and physical realms. As an early employee at LinkedIn he created one of the first mechanisms for supporting philanthropic causes via social networks: LinkedIn for Good. After building early communities on the Web, David took this practice back to the physical world, opening and operating a restaurant designed to cultivate community through shared meals.
Earlier in his career, as a research assistant in the Orthopaedic Sciences Laboratory at the University of Washington, David developed a novel platform for studying bone loss, which remains a core component of the lab’s research now two decades later.
David earned his B.A. degree with Honors from Stanford University.
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Cecilia Conrad, Ph.D.
CEO, Lever for Change;
Managing Director, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur FoundationLever for Change is a new nonprofit affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation whose mission is to unlock philanthropic capital and accelerate solutions to the world’s biggest social challenges. In addition to her role at Lever for Change, Dr. Conrad oversees the MacArthur Fellows program and MacArthur’s 100&Change, the Foundation’s competition for a single $100 million grant to help solve a critical problem of our time.
Before joining the Foundation in January 2013, Conrad had a distinguished career as both a professor and an administrator at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. She held the Stedman Sumner Chair in Economics and is currently an emerita professor of economics. She served as Associate Dean of the College (2004-2007), as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College (2009-2012), and as Acting President (Fall 2012). From 2007-2009, she was interim Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Scripps College.
Before joining the faculty at Pomona College, Conrad served on the faculties of Barnard College and Duke University. She was also an economist at the Federal Trade Commission and a visiting scholar at The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
Dr. Conrad is a member of the Board of Trustees of Bryn Mawr College, the Poetry Foundation, the National Academy of Social Insurance, IES, and the Sylvia Bozeman and Rhonda Hughes EDGE Foundation. She is a Trustee Emerita of Muhlenberg College.
She has received numerous recognitions for her scholarship and leadership, including California’s Carnegie Professor of the Year (2002), National Urban League’s Women of Power Award (2008), and the National Economic Association’s Samuel Z. Westerfield Award (2018). She has honorary doctorates from Claremont Graduate University and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Dr. Conrad received her B.A. degree from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.
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Shirley Tilghman, Ph.D.
President Emerita and Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
Shirley M. Tilghman was elected Princeton University’s 19th president on May 5, 2001 after serving on the Princeton faculty for 15 years. Upon the completion of her term in June of 2013, she returned to the faculty.
During her scientific career as a mammalian developmental geneticist, she studied the way in which genes are organized in the genome and regulated during early development, and was one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project for the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Tilghman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Developmental Biology, the Genetics Society of America Medal, and the L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and The Royal Society of London. She serves as a trustee of Amherst College, the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Simons Foundation. She serves on the Science Advisory Board of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is a director of The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and is a Fellow of the Corporation of Harvard College.
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John O. Dabiri, Ph.D.
Centennial Chair Professor, Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT) and Mechanical Engineering, Caltech
Dr. Dabiri’s research focuses on unsteady fluid mechanics and flow physics, with particular emphasis on topics relevant to biology, energy, and the environment. Current interests include biological fluid dynamics in the ocean, next-generation wind energy, and development of new experimental methods. Dabiri is a MacArthur Fellow and Fellow of the American Physical Society. Other honors include the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, and being named one of MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35" as well as one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10."
Dabiri serves on President Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB), the Board of Directors of NVIDIA Corporation, and the Board of Trustees of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He is Past Chair and member of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, as well as a member of the National Academies' Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. He previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNCTAM), the Defense Science Study Group, and as an Advisor to X at Alphabet (formerly GoogleX).
Dabiri received his B.S.E. summa cum laude in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University (2001); his M.S. in Aeronautics from Caltech (2003); and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering with a minor in Aeronautics from Caltech (2005). He was a Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering at Caltech from 2005 to 2015, during which time he also served as Director of the Center for Bioinspired Wind Energy, Chair of the Faculty, and Dean of Students. From 2015 to 2019 he served as a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, where he was recognized with the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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Reid Hoffman
Co-Founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI;
Partner at GreylockAn accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses. In 2003 he co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service. In 2009 he joined Greylock. In 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI. He currently serves on the boards of Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Joby, Microsoft, Nauto, Neeva, and a few early stage companies still in stealth. In addition to the Hypothesis Fund, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Endeavor, CZ Biohub, New America, Berggruen Institute, Opportunity@Work, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change. He is the host of Masters of Scale, an original podcast series and the first American media program to commit to a 50-50 gender balance for featured guests. He is the co-author of four best-selling books: The Start-Up of You, The Alliance, Blitzscaling, and Masters of Scale. He is an Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and a graduate of Stanford University.
Scientific Advisory Board
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Carolyn Bertozzi is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Chemical & Systems Biology and Radiology (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She completed her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1988 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1993. After completing postdoctoral work at UCSF in the field of cellular immunology, she joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996. In June 2015, she joined the faculty at Stanford University coincident with the launch of Stanford's ChEM-H institute.
Prof. Bertozzi's research interests span the disciplines of chemistry and biology with an emphasis on studies of cell surface glycosylation pertinent to disease states. Her lab focuses on profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and bacterial infection, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the area of immuno-oncology. She has been recognized with many honors and awards for her research accomplishments. She is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Heinrich Wieland Prize, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, among many others.
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Dr. Joseph DeRisi is the President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF. He employs an interdisciplinary approach combining genomics, bioinformatics, biochemistry, and bioengineering to study parasitic and viral infectious diseases in a wide range of organisms, for the purpose of discovering and studying novel or unrecognized biothreats. Early work in his lab contributed to the identification of the SARS coronavirus in 2003. In a parallel effort, Dr. DeRisi studies P. falciparum, the causative agent of the most deadly form of human malaria, in order to develop faster, better therapeutic options. Dr. DeRisi was one of the early pioneers of DNA microarray technology and whole genome expression profiling and is nationally recognized for his efforts to make this technology accessible and freely available.
He received a B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (1992) from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry (1999) from Stanford University prior to joining the UCSF faculty as a Sandler Fellow in 1999. Dr. DeRisi was a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator from 2006-2016, which he left to take on the role of Co-President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a non-profit medical research organization affiliated with UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University. Dr. DeRisi is a member of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. DeRisi is continuing to pursue efforts toward data-driven diagnostics for infectious disease, and recently, autoimmune disorders as well.
More recently, through his role as Co-President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, he has redirected his efforts to providing large-scale, rapid turnaround clinical COVID19 testing through a UCSF/Biohub collaboration called the “CLIAHUB.” As of November, the CLIAHUB has returned over 155,000 clinical results to Californians, in addition to thousands of full length SARS-CoV-2 genomes for genomic epidemiological studies, including studies of underserved and vulnerable populations. Starting in 2022, he has accepted the position as sole President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
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Dr. Margaret McFall-Ngai is the inaugural director of a newly launched research division at the Carnegie Institute for Science, the Division of Biosphere Sciences and Engineering. This research consortium deploys an integrated, molecular-to-global approach to biology, focusing on topics from exploring the frontiers of basic biology to tackling the challenges of sustainability, resilience, and adaptation to a changing climate.
Before joining Carnegie in 2022, Dr. McFall-Ngai was a professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and served as the Director of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center from 2015 to October 2020. She has instituted the C-MAIKI center for microbiome research at UH-M, and is PI of the WM Keck Foundation’s environmental microbiome observatory. Her research laboratory studies two areas: (i) the role of beneficial bacteria in health using the squid-vibrio model; and (ii) the biochemical and molecular ‘design’ of tissues that interact with light. In addition, she has been heavily involved in promoting microbiology as the cornerstone of the field of biology, and co-organizes and runs an advanced summer course on microbial symbioses as a visiting professor at the Gulbenkian Institute in Lisbon, Portugal.
Dr. McFall-Ngai was (2011-2013) a Moore Scholar at California Institute of Technology, and a Guggenheim fellow, and she currently is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology (2002), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), and the National Academy of Sciences (2014). She received a Doctor Honoris Causa, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2015. She became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2017, and was the ARCS Foundation Scientist of the Year in 2019. She currently chairs serves on the advisory committee for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR’s) program on Humans and the Microbiome, for the German Research Foundation Metaorganisms Consortium, and the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tuebingen.
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Dr. Claudia Benitez-Nelson is a Senior Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients and carbon and how these elements are influenced by both natural and anthropogenic processes. Over the past two decades, she has authored or co-authored more than 130 articles and is continuously supported by substantial, multi-year research and education grants.
Dr. Benitez-Nelson’s many research honors include the Early Career Award in Oceanography from AGU and Fulbright and Marie Curie Fellowships. She is an AAAS Fellow and an ASLO Sustaining Fellow. Dr. Benitez-Nelson is also highly regarded as a teacher and mentor. She received the University of South Carolina’s Distinguished Professor of the Year Award, SEC Faculty Achievement Award, and Outstanding Faculty Advisor of the Year as well as the AGU Sulzman Award for Excellence in Education and Mentoring and the Oceanography Society’s Mentoring Award for Excellence and/or Innovation in Mentoring the Next Generation of Ocean Scientists. She is the current Chair of the National Academy of Science’s Ocean Studies Board.
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Dr. Larry Corey is an internationally renowned expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development, and the former president and director of Fred Hutch. His research focuses on herpes viruses, HIV, the novel coronavirus and other viral infections, including those associated with cancer. He is principal investigator of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, or HVTN, which conducts studies of HIV vaccines at over 80 clinical trial sites in 16 countries on five continents. Under his leadership, the HVTN has become the model for global, collaborative research. Dr. Corey is also the principal investigator of the Fred Hutch-based operations center of the COVID-19 Prevention Network, or CoVPN, and co-leads the network’s vaccine testing pipeline.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the Board of Scientific Counselors-Basic Sciences of the National Cancer Institute, a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and a member of the American Epidemiological Society and the Association of American Physicians. He is the recipient of the Pan American Society Clinical Virology Award, the American Society for STD Research Parran Award, the University of Michigan Medical School Distinguished Alumnus Award and the Infectious Diseases Society of America Ender’s Award. He was elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2012 and the recipient of the 2012 Cubist-ICAAC Award, American Society for Microbiology. He also sits on the scientific advisory boards of Immune Design and Vir Biotechnology.
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Victoria's multidisciplinary research program spans the interface between environmental microbiology, geochemistry, and geology. Through the integrated application of environmental 'omics approaches, stable isotope analysis, and imaging, her group is characterizing the interspecies interactions and ecological physiology of archaea, bacteria, and viruses linked to the cycling of methane, sulfur, nitrogen, and metals in ocean sediments and extreme environments.
Victoria Orphan received a B.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (2001) from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was a National Research Council Associate (2002–2004) at the NASA Ames Research Center. In 2004, she joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where she is currently the James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Orphan is also, since 2008, an adjunct scientist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and her scientific articles have appeared in Science, Nature, Environmental Microbiology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, among many others.
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Drew Endy is a member of the bioengineering faculty at Stanford University and BioBricks Foundation president (biobricks.org). His research teams pioneered amplifying genetic logic, rewritable DNA data storage, reliably-reuseable standard biological parts, and genome refactoring. Drew helped launch the new undergraduate majors in bioengineering at both MIT and Stanford; he also co-founded the iGEM competition, a global genetic engineering “olympics” now engaging over 6,000 students annually (igem.org). In 2013 the White House recognized Drew for his work on open-source biotechnology and, more recently, he received an honorary doctorate from the Technische Universiteit Delft.
Drew has served on the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the Committee on Science, Technology, & Law; he currently serves on the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Advisory Committee.
Drew was a co-founder of Gen9, Inc., a DNA construction company; he returned to serve as a director while Gen9 was successfully acquired. Drew worked briefly with the Rapid Evaluation team at Google [X] and also served on the building project team for the Shriram Center at Stanford. He is a founding co-director of the NIST/Stanford Joint Initiative for Metrology in Biology (jimb.stanford.edu). Esquire magazine recognized Drew as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century.
Operations
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Pajau Vangay, Ph.D.
Sr. Director, Scientific Network
Pajau Vangay received her Ph.D. in Computational Biology from the University of Minnesota, where she worked in the research lab of Dr. Dan Knights. Her graduate research focused on the impact of migration on the human gut microbiome and obesity development in refugee communities in the US. She also has a M.S. degree in Food Microbiology from Cornell University, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the Colorado School of Mines.
After completing her Ph.D., she joined the California Council on Science and Technology Science and Technology Policy Fellowship program as a policy committee consultant and legislative aide in the California Legislature. Prior to her current role at the Hypothesis Fund, she was based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was the Scientific Community Manager for the National Microbiome Data Collaborative and partnered with scientific communities to champion open science and data stewardship practices. As Sr. Director, Scientific Network at the Hypothesis Fund, she supports and empowers our diverse network of scientists in identifying and pursuing high-risk, high-reward projects.
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David Sanford
Founder & CEO
David founded the Hypothesis Fund in 2022 to support breakthrough research that increases our adaptability against systemic risks to the health of humans and the planet.
Prior to launching the Hypothesis Fund, David was Chief of Staff in the Office of Reid Hoffman, responsible for managing a broad portfolio of philanthropic, civic, business, and intellectual initiatives.
He has served as a Board Observer at Change.org and on numerous nonprofit and company advisory boards.
David has pioneered community building both in the digital and physical realms. As an early employee at LinkedIn he created one of the first mechanisms for supporting philanthropic causes via social networks: LinkedIn for Good. After building early communities on the Web, David took this practice back to the physical world, opening and operating a restaurant designed to cultivate community through shared meals.
Earlier in his career, as a research assistant in the Orthopaedic Sciences Laboratory at the University of Washington, David developed a novel platform for studying bone loss, which remains a core component of the lab’s research now two decades later.
David earned his B.A. degree with Honors from Stanford University.
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Flora Lichtman
Managing Editor
Flora has produced science media for almost 20 years across many formats. She got her start at NPR's Science Friday, a live science talk show, working her way up from intern to fill-in host, and resident videographer. From there, she worked as a video producer for The New York Times, co-creating an Emmy-nominated film series that dramatized scientific discoveries using... paper puppets. She also was nominated for an Emmy for her writing on Bill Nye's Netflix show "Bill Nye Saves the World."
She has created and launched a number of podcasts in various roles, including hosting Gimlet's beloved Every Little Thing, which connected listeners to experts who could answer their burning questions. Making science accessible, relatable and human has been a focus of Flora's career. Some of her inspiration comes from her own experience in science: Long, long ago, she worked at a NATO oceanographic lab in Italy. For the lab's research expeditions, she lived on a ship where apertivi were served on the top deck, hoisted there via pulley by the ship's chef.