David Gollaher

David L. Gollaher was the founding President & CEO of the California Healthcare Institute (CHI), 1993-2014, from which he retired to join Gilead Sciences. After his retirement from CHI, CHI merged with BayBio to form the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA) in 2015.
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 senior executive at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, Gollaher helped found CHI, a public policy research and advocacy organization that represents more than 365 California academic institutions, biotechnology companies and medical technology firms. 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 was a co-founder and board member of Vision Robotics Corporation, sharing six patents in the field of autonomous robotic navigation.