Tania Simoncelli joined the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017 with a singular vision to build a program committed to centralizing essential leaders in the biomedical research ecosystem: patients. In service of this goal, she launched the Rare As One Project, a first-of-its-kind program that supports patient communities in their quest to accelerate research through grantmaking, capacity building support, and the development of new tools and partnerships. Her commitment to this work is grounded in twenty years’ experience in advocacy and policy to address challenges at the complex intersection of science, technology, law and ethics, including as Senior Advisor to Dr. Eric Lander at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Assistant Director of Forensic Science and Biomedical Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Special Assistant to Commissioner Margaret Hamburg at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; and Science Advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, where she spearheaded the ACLU’s successful Supreme Court case challenging the patenting of human genes.

She holds a B.A. in Biology and Society from Cornell University and an M.S. in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley and is co-author with Sheldon Krimsky of Genetic Justice: DNA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations and Civil Liberties (Columbia University Press: 2011).