Elizabeth Anne Holmes

Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American health technology entrepreneur. She is
the founder and CEO of Theranos, a health technology and medical laboratory services company.

Holmes was born in February 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her father, Christian Holmes IV, worked in the
United States, Africa and China as part of government agencies such as USAID.Her mother, Noel Anne
(Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. She has a brother, Christian Holmes V, who is
the director of product management at Theranos. One of her ancestors was a founder of the
Fleischmann's Yeast company.
As a child, she read the biography of her great-great-grandfather Christian R. Holmes, who was a
surgeon, engineer, inventor, and a decorated World War I veteran. He was born in Denmark in 1857 and
was the dean of the University Of Cincinnati College Of Medicine, where a hospital is named after him.
The career of her ancestor inspired Elizabeth to take up medicine, but she soon found that she had a
fear of needles. She later described this fear as one of her motivations to launch Theranos.
When she was 9, her family moved to Houston, where her father had taken up a job with Tenneco.
Intrigued by their father's work in China, Elizabeth and her brother learned Mandarin Chinese at a young
age. She spent her teenage years in China, and while still in school, started a business selling C++
compilers to Chinese universities.

Education
In 2002, Holmes enrolled at Stanford University to study chemistry. As a freshman, she was named one
of the "President's Scholars" and given a stipend of $3,000 to pursue a research project. She persuaded
her chemical engineering professor, Channing Robertson, to use the money for a project in his lab.
Holmes supplemented her childhood knowledge of Mandarin with summer language programs at
Stanford. This helped her obtain an internship at the Genome Institute of Singapore. The Institute was
working on developing new methods to detect the SARS coronavirus in blood or nasal swabs.
After her return to the US, she wrote a patent application on a wearable patch that would help
administer a drug, monitor the variables in the patient's blood and adjust the dosage to achieve the
desired effect. She showed her application to Professor Robertson, and told him they could put a
cellphone chip on this patch for telemedicine. She filed the patent application in September 2003, as
"Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery".

Business career
Holmes proposed establishing a company to Professor Robertson in the fall of 2003, while she was a 19year old sophomore at Stanford. She used the money that her parents had saved for her education, to
establish Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto. Later, she changed the company's name to Theranos (an
amalgam of "therapy" and "diagnosis"), because she believed that many people had a cynical reaction to
the word "cure". Initially, she worked out of a basement of a group college house. A semester later, she
dropped out to pursue her business career full-time. Professor Robertson served as a director of the
company.
Over the next decade, the company grew gradually, raising $400 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson
and Larry Ellison, among others. During this time, Theranos operated in "stealth mode", remaining
highly secretive to avoid potential competitors and investors who could fund a competitor. In 2007, it
took three former employees to court, accusing them of misappropriating trade secrets.
By 2014, the company offered 200 tests and was licensed to run in every state of the US.It had 500
employees and was valued at more than $9 billion. Holmes retained control of more than 50% of the
company's equity.
As of 2014, Holmes has 18 US patents and 66 non-US patents in her name and is listed as a co-inventor
on over a hundred patent applications. Holmes is the youngest self-made female billionaire with net
worth is an estimated $4.5 billion.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
At TEDMED 2014, Founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, talked about the
importance of enabling early detection of disease through new diagnostic tools and empowering
individuals to make educated decisions about their
healthcare:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE