Shirley Tilghman was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2013. She was president of Princeton University from 2001 to 2013, during which time she oversaw the hiring of more women to the faculty, extensive growth in the role of creative and performing arts on campus, multiple major initiatives in the sciences and engineering, an expansion of the undergraduate student body and the addition of four-year residential colleges, as well as the university’s $1.88 billion Aspire campaign.
Prior to her presidency, Tilghman had served on the faculty of Princeton since 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. She was also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and founding director of the university’s multidisciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Before arriving at Princeton, she made a number of groundbreaking discoveries as part of the team that cloned the first mammalian gene, as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and as an adjunct associate professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tilghman holds an Honors B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen’s University in Ontario, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia and an honorary doctorate from Amherst.