In brief
Anne Wojcicki (born 1973) is an American entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer of 23andMe, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing and biotechnology company headquartered in South San Francisco, California.
Born in Palo Alto, California, Wojcicki is the youngest of three daughters of Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish-born physicist and former chairman of Stanford University's physics department, and Esther Wojcicki (née Hochman), an American educator of Russian-Jewish descent renowned for her innovative journalism teaching at Palo Alto High School. Her older sisters include Janet Wojcicki, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Susan Wojcicki, who served as CEO of YouTube from 2014 until 2023 and died in 2024 after a battle with lung cancer.
Anne Wojcicki was born on July 28, 1973, in San Mateo County, California, to Polish-American parents Stanley Wojcicki, a physics professor at Stanford University, and Esther Wojcicki, a Russian-Jewish educator and journalist. Stanley, born in Warsaw in 1937, fled Poland at age 12 in 1949 following the Communist takeover after World War II, eventually immigrating to the United States and building a distinguished academic career. Esther, born in the United States to Orthodox Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York in the 1930s, became a renowned high school journalism teacher and author, instilling values of independence and creativity in her family.
Photographs
Hero photograph: Wikimedia Commons
