The Kavli Foundation, President and CEO

The Kavli Foundation named Cynthia M. Friend, PhD as its President and Chief Executive Officer. 

Friend has been a member of the Harvard University faculty since 1982, most recently as the Theodore Williams Richards Professor of Chemistry. She has served in numerous leadership positions while at Harvard, including Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Friend was the first female chair and the first female professor of chemistry at the university.

Friend was also the Director of The Rowland Institute at Harvard, a privately endowed, nonprofit, basic research organization conceived to advance science in a wide variety of fields. Prior to her work at Harvard, Friend served as Associate Lab Director at SLAC National Accelerator Lab, a preeminent international facility for X-ray science.

Friend is on the board of directors at Bruker Instruments, a publicly traded company specializing in instrumentation and medical diagnostics and is Vice Chair of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. This federal committee provides independent advice on complex scientific and technical issues important in management and implementation of basic energy sciences programs.

Among her numerous awards and honors, Friend is a member elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2019) and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), American Chemical Society (2010), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009). She has received several awards from the American Chemical Society, including the ACS Award in Surface Chemistry (2017), the George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon Chemistry (2009), and the Francis P. Garvan-John M. Olin Garvan Medal (1991).

Friend received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Her post-doctoral research was conducted at Stanford University.

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