Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Tell people what you're excited about and ask them what they're excited about and see if there's a match. And I think that was really important. And then I also think that because I had been at Genentech and I was sort of gregarious and knew a lot of people, and people knew that I had decent business savvy. I wasn't going to waste their money.
We were very committed to use the money wisely, especially in the hard times, and do special things at UCSF. So I was surprised. I sort of worried that I would be sad if people said no. Yeah. That it would be weird, especially if I knew them well. So I would get myself psyched up for the beginning of it. And then by the end, I'd be like, oh, that's fine.
Next time, if you're in town, let's talk again and maybe it'll change or whatever. But it was actually fun. I got to talk to and meet a lot of great people.
Probably 40% externally, a lot external.
Working with the team.
Provost, CEO of the hospital, lawyer, all the deans. That was really important. And then part of it was monthly we met with all the chancellors, with the president of the university, it was Mark Udoff at the time, and then he stepped down after... a while. But the chancellor's meetings were funny because they all had undergrads. I always felt like I was squirming, like, are we done yet?
I thought it was just really important. My favorite thing, every Friday, lunch, Mission Bay, they had a science talk. And they'd have some pizza, Chinese food, something. And you'd look around the room and it'd be like Bruce Albert's Liz Blackburn. There'd be four Nobel Prize winners in this little cramped room listening to science.
No, I'd just go over on the shuttle bus, eat a slice of pizza and enjoy. Yeah, amazing. It was really good.
Well, to my surprise, I think I got an email or I think it was an email from Melinda. Did I have time to talk? And UCSF throws a big event every year that's kind of friend-making, fundraising, everything, and we give out awards, recognition to people whose work we respect a lot. So I had invited Melinda the year before and thought, she'll never come. Yeah. You invite people, the throwaway invite.
And she accepted and came, actually came with her mom and dad even better. I thought that was nice. So she sent me an email and she said that she and Bill wanted me to look at being the next CEO of the Gates Foundation. And I was surprised. I had not expected that. And I started having discussions with them. It was actually funny.
I went up to Seattle and they were having all this hush-hush, you know, this was very cloak and dagger. So I went to their house because I had had a meeting with Melinda and I needed to meet with Bill and it was Halloween. The kids are coming and going. It was kind of crazy. And so I had talked to him. And I talked to my husband. You know, my husband worked at the Gates Foundation.
He led the HIV and TB programs about five years before.
No, no, he had gone. He was commuting to Seattle, which was dreadful. But he knew the Gates Foundation. So he and I were talking about this. And I was like, oh, God, you know, I've only been at UCSF five years. I just found where the bathrooms are, you know, that kind of thing. And it was going well. I was happy with that. They asked for a teleconference and they got on the phone.
And especially Bill made this big pitch that a lot of people could do the UCSF job with all due respect, as Bill would put it. But I was the only person who they both wanted and who could do this job. I was perfect for the job and it's really important for the world and I needed to do it.
I think it was less obvious then, but I think now they had started to kind of have disparate views of how the foundation should operate. Melinda has been really all over women's issues, all over. And Bill would do another run at polio. It's like the goal broadly that all lives have equal value, which, by the way, I think is a wonderful thing. They share, but they come at it from different ways.
And so I think that the thing that resonated for me is that I could see both those points of view.
Yes and no. It's one thing to have enormous resources. It's another to know where one of the most important assets they have is the time and energy of Bill and Melinda. They actually show up, things happen.
I thought that I could add value. I thought I would learn a lot. And I did think that UCSF would be fine without me. I felt like we were back on our feet financially. I thought that Sam Hogood, who was the dean of the School of Medicine, I had a ton of respect for him and thought he was the obvious person to take my place and that it would be okay.
I don't think they did. I actually think they had a lot of respect for the Gates Foundation and thought, oh, well, that's a cool job. At least the way they showed up with me. Maybe when I wasn't there, they did.
It's a couple thousand. It's a big foundation, big building, big foundation with people all over the world now. There was a lot I wasn't surprised by, like the global health stuff. I knew what they were doing and I thought it was interesting and great.
Showing 261–280 of 362 · page 14 of 19
← Previous
Next →