Priscilla Chan is well-known as the wife of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but she has a thriving career of her own in philanthropy, and is a former teacher and pediatrician.
Here are three things to know bout Chan:
She’s the child of refugees
Chan, who is very private about her personal life, is the child of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States in the 1970s.
"My grandparents did something I think is completely courageous," she said in a February 2019 interview with "CBS This Morning." "They put their kids on a boat and watched that boat drift off to sea. (My family knows) very firsthand that hardship is real and opportunities are available but not available to everyone."
She’s a pediatrician
Chan also worked with children as an elementary school science teacher. According to her Facebook page, she remained a teacher while doing her residency and has since left those jobs to work full time at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She co-founded the organization with her husband in 2015.
She met Zuckerberg at Harvard University
Chan was at Harvard for four weeks on a full scholarship when she met her now-husband.
According to a 2010 profile of Zuckerberg in The New Yorker, the two were waiting in line for the bathroom at an Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity party. Zuckerberg was a member of the Jewish college fraternity.
“He was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,” Chan said. “I remember he had these beer glasses that said ‘pound include beer dot H.’ It’s a tag for C++. It’s like college humor but with a nerdy, computer-science appeal.”
Related: Mark Zuckerberg: 3 things to know about the Facebook founder
Ten years after they met, the couple married in a surprise ceremony at their home in Palo Alto, California. Zuckerberg announced they were expecting their first child, a baby girl, in July 2015, and in the process revealed that Chan had "three miscarriages along the way" since trying to conceive. Later that year, they welcomed Maxima "Max" Chan Zuckerberg. Their second daughter, August Chan Zuckerberg, was born in 2017.
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