Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases, became a household name in 2020. Fauci has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for more than three decades and is also President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser on COVID-19.
Fauci has been married to fellow doctor and HIV/AIDS expert Christine Grady since 1985. They have three grown daughters.
Here’s what you need to know about Fauci’s children and family:
1. Youngest Daughter Alison Fauci Was on the Rowing Team at Stanford & Works as a Software Engineer for Twitter
Fauci and Grady’s youngest daughter is Alison Christine Fauci, who was born in April 1992. She and her sisters attended the private, all-girls National Cathedral School located in Washington, D.C.
After graduating from high school, Alison Fauci relocated to the west coast for college and has continued to live on that side of the country ever since. She attended Stanford University and majored in computer science.
Alison Fauci also competed on the rowing team. According to her profile on Stanford’s website, she competed all four years and racked up titles each year. During her senior season, Fauci was named the Pac-12 Scholar Athlete of the Year, made the Pac-12 All-Academic first team and placed sixth at the NCAA Championships. She also helped Stanford win its first Pac-12 Championship and served as a captain during her senior season.
Alison Fauci graduated from Stanford in 2014 and accepted a job at Twitter. She works as a software engineer and, according to her LinkedIn profile, was focused on developing “ad formats for the Twitter for Android app.” (Her LinkedIn profile has since been made private or deleted).
Alison Fauci also devotes her time to volunteering. She is a co-leader for the organization November Project San Francisco. According to the group’s website, the team organizes and leads free workouts for adults in the Bay area. Her bio on the site explains, “Former Hip Hop Dance Brazil Champion ’13, Ali brings the heat. Expect to limp away from her workouts. Ali enjoys tight hugs and pop, lock, and dropping it better than you can.”
2. Oldest Daughter Jennifer Fauci Has Degrees From Harvard & Columbia & Works in Psychology
Fauci and Grady’s oldest daughter, Jennifer Ellen Fauci, arrived in August 1986, the year after they tied the knot. She followed her parent’s footsteps into the world of medicine but chose a different route.
Jennifer Fauci majored in social studies at Harvard University and graduated in 2008. According to her LinkedIn profile, she earned a master’s degree in developmental and child psychology from Columbia University in 2013. She also has a doctorate in Counseling Psychology from Boston College. (She has also since removed her LinkedIn profile).
While still a student herself, Jennifer Fauci began working as a teacher. She taught sixth-grade science for a nonprofit charter school organization in Brooklyn from 2008 to 2010. For six months in 2011, she served as an intervention teacher in Washington, D.C. Serving as a teaching assistant and instructor was also part of her responsibilities as a graduate student at Columbia.
Currently, Jennifer Fauci works for the Cambridge Health Alliance, an academic community health care system in Massachusetts. She is a post-doctoral psychology fellow with a focus on child and adolescent acute services.
Jennifer Fauci is listed as an author on at least two medical articles published by the National Institutes of Health. Both articles focus on domestic violence and analyze strategies for how to best help victims recover.
3. Megan Fauci Graduated From Johns Hopkins University & Teaches Elementary School in New Orleans
The middle Fauci daughter, Megan Elizabeth Fauci, was a part of the National Cathedral School class of 2007. She went on to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for her undergraduate degree. According to her Facebook page, Megan Fauci was in the pre-medical program.
But she chose to pursue teaching as a career rather than medicine. According to a 2017 article featuring National Cathedral alumni, Megan Fauci worked with the nonprofit organization City Year in Chicago for one year. She then moved to New Orleans for a job as an elementary school teacher.
Megan Fauci noted on her Facebook page that she works for FirstLine Schools in New Orleans, a charter school organization.
4. Grady Worked With AIDS Patients While Pregnant With All Three of Her Daughters
Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, has an esteemed medical career of her own. She is the chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, a position she has held since 2012.
Grady was on the frontlines in the early fight against AIDS in the 1980s. Her thesis was about the ethical issues surrounding the development of a vaccine to prevent or treat HIV and AIDS. The report, titled “The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventive HIV Vaccine,” was published as a book in 1995.
Grady was working as a nurse with the NIH Clinical Center in 1983 when she met Fauci. He told the Financial Times that they met over the bed of a patient. They got married in 1985 and began expanding their family the next year.
Grady continued her work with AIDS patients throughout all three of her pregnancies. In an extensive interview with the National Institutes of Health in 1997, Grady reflected on what it was like to work in that environment as an expectant mother:
In 1986, when I was pregnant and was working in the area, there was still confusion about whether or not it was safe, whether pregnancy was an issue in terms of immunosusceptibility or something like that. At the time, I also remember, again, talking to all the people around and getting the data that was available and being pretty assured, both in my own mind and by the people that I spoke to, that short of a needlestick or something, in being pregnant, I probably was not at any risk from the HIV.
Now there were other disease problems, CMV [cytomegalovirus] and some of the other things that some of the AIDS patients and others had, that may have been more of a problem. There is a story that I have told many people. We were fairly clear that CMV and pregnancy was—we still know that—and is a problem. There were people who advised me that there were some invasive kinds of procedures that I should avoid doing with the AIDS patients because they were heavy carriers of CMV, and I should use certain precautions, which I did.
Then I remember a patient, whom I took care of very intensively, who had eosinophilia, which is very different, had nothing to do with HIV, and he was dying. We were all over this man—and I was pregnant. Only later, by autopsy, was it discovered that he died of CMV pneumonitis. So we were doing chest tubes, and he was spewing sputum and coughing all over everybody. Those are the things that happen. You cannot predict. You cannot always protect yourself, but I guess I was lucky.
5. Anthony Fauci’s Parents Owned a Pharmacy in Brooklyn & His Grandparents Were Immigrants From Italy
Anthony Fauci was raised in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Stephen, attended Columbia University and became a pharmacist. His mother, Eugenia, went to Hunter College. They got married after graduating from high school.
According to the National Institutes of Health, Stephen and Eugenia Fauci ran a neighborhood pharmacy in Bensonhurst and the family lived in an apartment above the business. Anthony Fauci delivered prescriptions on his bicycle while his older sister, Denise, helped to run the cash register.
Anthony Fauci’s grandparents, on both sides of his family, were immigrants from Italy. According to the NIH, his father’s side of the family was originally from Sciacca, Sicily, and ran a hot springs spa. Fauci’s maternal grandparents immigrated from Naples. His grandfather on that side of the family worked as an artist.
As a teenager, Fauci played basketball and graduated from Regis High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He chose College of the Holy Cross for his undergraduate education before graduating from Cornell Medical College in 1966.
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