Sue Desmond-Hellmann (born 1958) is an American oncologist and biotechnology leader who served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2014 to 2020.

She was previously Chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the first woman to hold the position, and Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professor, and before that president of product development at Genentech, where she played a role in the development of the first gene-targeted cancer drugs, Avastin and Herceptin.

She also served a three-year term on the Economic Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco beginning in January 2009.

She said that many of her holdings had been purchased on her behalf by her stockbroker and that she was too busy to oversee all her investments, although she had included the stock on her financial disclosure statement.

[12] She proposed creating partnerships between UCSF and private pharmaceutical corporations and other sources of funding, in order to increase its revenues and resolve its projected financial instability.

[3][7][13][14] Desmond-Hellmann served as UCSF Chancellor until March 2014, holding the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Distinguished Professorship during her tenure.

[5] In 2011, Desmond-Hellmann co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee that recommended creating a Google Maps-like data network aimed at developing more diagnostics and treatments tailored to individual patients — a concept known as precision medicine.

[16] The NAS report, titled "Toward Precision Medicine: Building a Knowledge Network for Biomedical Research and a New Taxonomy of Disease", was described by Keith Yamamoto, Vice Chancellor for Research at UCSF, as "the most important National Academy of Sciences Framework Analysis since that advisory body recommended that the United States go forward with the Human Genome Project".

[22] In 2024 Desmond-Hellmann received the Clark Kerr Award for distinguished leadership in higher education from the UC Berkeley Academic Senate.