Shirley M. Tilghman was elected Princeton University’s 19th president on May 5, 2001, and assumed office
\non June 15, 2001. An exceptional teacher and a world-renowned scholar and leader in the field of molecular
\nbiology, she served on the Princeton faculty for 15 years before being named president.
\nTilghman, a native of Canada, received her Honors B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston,
\nOntario, in 1968. After two years of secondary school teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she obtained her
\nPh.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia.
\nDuring postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, she made a number of groundbreaking
\ndiscoveries while participating in cloning the first mammalian gene, and then continued to make scientific
\nbreakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and
\nan adjunct associate professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of
\nPennsylvania.
\nTilghman came to Princeton in 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. Two years later,
\nshe also joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an investigator. In 1998, she took on additional
\nresponsibilities as the founding director of Princeton’s multi-disciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative
\nGenomics.
\nA member of the National Research Council’s committee that set the blueprint for the U.S. effort in the Human
\nGenome Project, Tilghman also was one of the founding members of the National Advisory Council of the
\nHuman Genome Project Initiative for the National Institutes of Health.
\nShe is renowned not only for her pioneering research, but for her national leadership on behalf of women in
\nscience and for promoting efforts to make the early careers of young scientists as meaningful and productive
\nas possible. She received national attention for a report on “Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists” that was
\nissued in 1998 by a committee she chaired for the National Research Council, and she has helped launch
\nthe careers of many scholars as a member of the Pew Charitable Trusts Scholars Program in the Biomedical
\nSciences Selection Committee and the Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust Scholar Selection Committee.
\nFrom 1993 through 2000, Tilghman chaired Princeton’s Council on Science and Technology, which encourages
\nthe teaching of science and technology to students outside the sciences, and in 1996 she received Princeton’s
\nPresident’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She initiated the Princeton Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship, a
\nprogram across all the science and engineering disciplines that brings postdoctoral students to Princeton each
\nyear to gain experience in both research and teaching.
\nIn 2002, Tilghman was one of five winners of the L’Or\u00e9al-UNESCO international For Women in Science
\nAward, and the following year received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Developmental
\nBiology.
\nTilghman is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute
\nof Medicine and the Royal Society of London. She serves as a Trustee of The Jackson Laboratory and the
\nCarnegie Endowment for International Peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-95","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fcihr.ca\/prize\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}