David Gollaher
David L. Gollaher was the founding President & CEO of the California Healthcare Institute, 1993–2014, from which he joined Gilead Sciences where, from 2014 to 2018, he headed worldwide Government Affairs and Policy. Subsequently, in early 2019, he moved to head policy and government affairs at Vir Biotechnology, an emerging growth company focused on infectious diseases. In 2018, he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California.
Gollaher is an historian of science and medicine, and public policy executive. He completed undergraduate studies at University of California and received his masters and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. Subsequently, he was a fellow of Harvard's Houghton Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Gollaher's biographical study, Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix received the Organization of American Historians' 1996 Avery O. Craven Award. His 2000 study Circumcision: A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery was the first full medical scholarly history of the subject.
In 1993, after several years as a member of the executive team at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, Gollaher worked with California biotechnology industry leaders to found CHI, a public policy research and advocacy organization that grew to represent more than 360 California academic institutions, biopharmaceutical companies, medical technology and professional firms. After he left CHI, the organization merged with BayBio in 2015 to create the California Life Sciences Association. In 2003, he was appointed to the California State Legislature's Stem Cell Advisory Panel, and to the U.S. Congressional Homeland Security Advisory Committee. Gollaher has served on the Advisory Board of the J. David Gladstone Institutes, the California Council on Science and Technology, and the Board of Overseers for Scripps Research. In September 2018, he joined the board of Cidara Therapeutics. Outside life sciences, he was a co-founder and is board member of Vision Robotics Corporation, sharing patents in the field of autonomous robotic navigation.
