Nicole Shanahan

She said that her mother, who was born in China and immigrated to the United States from Guangzhou City in the 1980s, worked in the U.S. as a maid before becoming an accountant.

Shanahan attended Saint Mary's College High School before moving to Washington state, where she earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Puget Sound.

Nicole Ann Shanahan (born September 16, 1985) is an American technologist and attorney.

She is the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his 2024 independent presidential campaign.

Born in California, Shanahan graduated from the University of Puget Sound and then the Santa Clara University School of Law.

Before law school, she worked as a paralegal and patent specialist, the latter role at defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp. She was a fellow at Stanford Law School's CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Shanahan was born in Placer County, California, on September 16, 1985.

She grew up in Oakland, California.

In a 2023 interview with People magazine, Shanahan said that she had a "very hard" childhood marked by traumatic experiences and poverty.

In the 2010s and 2020s, Shanahan made various contributions to left-leaning organizations and Democratic political candidates, including Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and the congressional campaigns of Ro Khanna.

Her father, who died in 2014, was a white American, of German and Irish descent.

She described him as a sufferer of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia who struggled with substance abuse.

Studying Asian studies, economics, and Mandarin Chinese, she worked as a paralegal and patent specialist (the latter role at defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.) before attending Santa Clara University School of Law, from which she graduated with a J.D. in 2014.

While in law school, she was an exchange student at National University of Singapore.

She became interested in patent law as a law student; after becoming a lawyer, she founded a Palo Alto-based legal tech company, ClearAccessIP, and was its CEO.

Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018; they separated in 2021, and divorced in 2023.

In 2018, Shanahan helped fund and launch the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality within the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

She established her private foundation, Bia-Echo, in 2019.

In March 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named Shanahan as his vice presidential running mate.

Shanahan has said that she is "not an anti-vaxxer" but has expressed support for Kennedy's anti-vaccine advocacy and questions the scientific consensus on their safety and efficacy.

In 2019, she established her private foundation, Bia-Echo.

The foundation is named after Bia, the ancient Greek goddess associated with energy.

According to financial disclosure documents over a three-year period, Bia-Echo's sole donor was Shanahan's then-husband, Sergey Brin.

In 2019, Shanahan pledged to contribute $100 million through Bia-Echo over five years, mostly for "reproductive longevity" research, which aims to help women become pregnant later in life). Shanahan has repeatedly criticized in vitro fertilization (calling IVF "one of the biggest lies that's being told about women's health today") and championed unconventional research that she believes might allow women to have children into their 50s (suggesting, for example, that exposure to sunlight might aid fertility).

In a 2023 interview, Shanahan said that finding a "cure to autism" was an additional focus of Bia-Echo, and estimated that she spent 60% of her time researching autism.

In 2022, Shanahan gave $70 million to Blue Meridian Partners, which makes grants to nonprofits that aim to help the impoverished.

She co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in December 2019, along with other wealthy Silicon Valley figures.

She sold the company to a competitor, IPwe, in 2020.

She has spoken on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on law and the legal profession.

She was a fellow at Stanford Law School's CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Shanahan served as executive producer for the films Kiss The Ground in 2020, and Evolver in 2022.

Shanahan is a member of the board of Carbon Royalty Corp. She invested in Linus Biotechnology, Inc. (LinusBio), a biotech firm, during a venture funding round in January 2023.

In 2023, she joined the board of Extreme Tech Challenge.

She is the "Global Joy Officer" and a member of the board at the Sloomoo Institute.

In 2020, Brin donated at least $23 million in shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company) to Bia-Echo.

He made another contribution to the foundation in 2021, but did not make a contribution in 2022.

In 2022, the Bia-Echo Foundation reported owning $13.7 million in government securities and $12.2 million in stocks and bonds, and reported making $0 in grants or contributions to outside groups.

In 2020, Shanahan was a "major donor" for Measure J, a criminal justice reform referendum in Los Angeles County.

In the same year, she contributed $150,000 to support George Gascón in his challenge to incumbent Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey.

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Shanahan contributed $2,800 each to the campaigns of Marianne Williamson and Pete Buttigieg.