Marc Tessier-Lavigne was the first Rockefeller University president to come from industry when he left a top job at Genentech in 2011 to move on to Manhattan’s East Side. In his five years running Rockefeller, Tessier-Lavigne was a staunch advocate of New York City’s life sciences scene, believing in its potential to rise as the next biotech hub complementing Boston and the San Francisco Bay area. “I have a slogan: by 2020 we want to be what Boston was in 2000, which is when Boston’s biotech ecosystem started to take off in a big way,” he says.
