Marc Trevor Tessier-Lavigne FMedSci is a neuroscientist who is president of The Rockefeller University in New York City. He was formerly executive vice president for research and the chief scientific officer at Genentech. Tessier-Lavigne succeeded Nobel laureate Paul Nurse. He is the first industry executive to assume the Rockefeller presidency. He is also a member of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund's Scientific Advisory Board. Tessier-Lavigne was born in Trenton, Ontario. He grew up in Europe from ages 7 to 17, where his father was serving with NATO as part of the Canadian Armed Forces. He earned his first undergraduate degree from McGill University, where he majored in Physics and attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he "first encountered the nervous system and fell in love with it" and earned a B.A. in Philosophy and Physiology. Tessier-Lavigne was awarded a doctorate in physiology from University College London. He was hired by Genentech in 2003 as its senior vice president, Research Drug Discovery, after teaching at the University of California, San Francisco from 1991 to 2001 and at Stanford University starting in 2001.