Stanford E-Corner presents the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.

On today's episode, we have Mark Tessier Levine, president of Stanford University.

He's also a pioneering neuroscientist, biotech executive, and academic leader.

Before coming back to Stanford, he served as president of Rockefeller University.

Here's president, Tessie Levine. It's really great to be here and have the opportunity to share a little bit

about my background and a few of my thoughts about entrepreneurship. I thought that maybe what I do, we have a limited amount of time, just maybe give a little bit of background on myself my trajectory,

and then describe, you know, try to pull out a few of the lessons that I've learned about building and leading organizations that might

hopefully be of some use to some of the members of the audience.

So by way of background, as Tom said, I've been very fortunate to have experiences both in

academia and in the private sector.

I started my career as a scientist, a neuroscientist, working on how the brain develops during

embryonic and fetal development and also what goes wrong in, at the other end of the spectrum,

in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease where nerve cells die. I was a faculty member at UCSF in San Francisco and then recruited here to Stanford,

where I focused on understanding fundamental mechanisms of brain development and degeneration.

But in the course of this, I was also very fortunate being here in the Valley

to interact with people in the private sector and got involved in a

startup company as a scientific advisor learned something about that, saw the power of the private

sector, and then co-founded a first company in 2000, Renovus, focused on neurological disease,

where I learned a lot about applying scientific knowledge

to difficult problems like developing therapies for poorly treated disorders.

And that gave me exposure, it gave me some experience that got me interested in applying

fundamental knowledge. And then I was very lucky and fortunate to be invited to go to Genentech to oversee about two-thirds of the research organization.

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