FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 2, 2005
Contact: Carmen MacDougall, 202/939-2319, cmacdougall@CarnegieEndowment.org

Shirley M. Tilghman, president of Princeton University, has been elected to the board of trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, announced board chairman James C. Gaither. An exceptional teacher and a world-renowned scholar and leader in the field of molecular biology, Tilghman served on the Princeton faculty for 15 years before becoming president in 2001.

“We are delighted that Shirley will be joining the board. Her academic leadership and brilliant scholarship serve as models for the Carnegie Endowment and its research staff,” said Gaither. “We’ll value her contribution as we approach the 100th anniversary of the institution.”

Tilghman, a native of Canada, received her honors B.Sc. in chemistry from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1968. After two years of secondary school teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa, she obtained her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Temple University in Philadelphia.

During postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, she made a number of groundbreaking discoveries while participating in cloning the first mammalian gene, and then continued to make scientific breakthroughs as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and an adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tilghman went to Princeton in 1986 as the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences. Two years later, she also joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as an investigator. In 1998, she took on additional responsibilities as the founding director of Princeton's multi-disciplinary Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

She is renowned not only for her pioneering research, but also for her national leadership on behalf of women in science.

From 1993 through 2000, Tilghman chaired Princeton's Council on Science and Technology, which encourages the teaching of science and technology to students outside the sciences, and in 1996 she received Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
###