Fred Cohen, MD, D.Phil, currently is a Senior Managing Director of Vida Ventures, a venture capital firm that he co-founded in 2017. Vida currently manages ~$1 Billion in life sciences venture capital. He is also a Senior Advisor to TPG where he served as a Partner and founder of TPG Biotechnology, a life science focused investment effort from 2001-2016.
From 1980 through 2014, Dr. Cohen was at UCSF where he held various responsibilities as a research scientist, an Internist for hospitalized patients, a consulting Endocrinologist, and as the Chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism. His research interests included structure based drug design, prion diseases, computational biology and heteropolymer chemistry. Dr. Cohen has published over 200 peer reviewed articles, participated as a co-inventor on over 10 patents and has served as an editor or editorial board member of several international scientific journals.
Dr. Cohen received his BS degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, his D.Phil. in Molecular Biophysics from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, his MD from Stanford and his postdoctoral training and postgraduate medical training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at UCSF. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians. Dr. Cohen has received several awards for his work including a Searle Scholarship, Young Investigator Awards from the Endocrine Society and the Western Society for Clinical Investigation, and the LVMH Science pour l’art prize (shared with Stanley Prusiner). Dr. Cohen was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
Dr. Cohen currently serves on the Board of Directors of several biotechnology and pharmaceutical organizations including CareDx (CDNA), Progyny (PGNY), Intellia (NTLA), UroGen (URGN) and Veracyte (VCYT). He is a past member of the boards of Quintiles Transnational (Q), Biocryst (BCRX), Genomic Health (GHDX) and Tandem Diabetes (TNDM).
Fred lives in San Francisco with his wife, Carolyn Klebanoff M.D. They have three children, Alison, Michael and Jane. Drs. Klebanoff and Cohen were founders of Sweetwater Spectrum, a non-profit organization that creates and runs planned communities for adults with autism. He also serves on the Board of Overseers of the UCSF Foundation.