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 Initiative 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. She received national attention for a report on “Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists” that was
issued in 1998 by a committee she chaired for the National Research Council, and she has helped launch
the careers of many scholars as a member of the Pew Charitable Trusts Scholars Program in the Biomedical
Sciences Selection Committee and the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust Scholar Selection Committee.
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 international For Women in Science
Award, and the following year received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Developmental
Biology.
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 and the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.