Nicole Ann Shanahan (born September 26, 1985) is an American attorney and entrepreneur. She was the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his campaign in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Born in California, Shanahan graduated from the University of Puget Sound and the Santa Clara University School of Law. Before law school, she worked as a paralegal and then as a patent specialist at the defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp. She was a fellow at Stanford Law School's CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Shanahan married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2018; they separated in 2021 and divorced in 2023. She reportedly has a net worth of over $1 billion, primarily as a result of her marriage to Brin. In 2019, she established a private foundation, Bia-Echo, that promotes research to lengthen the human reproductive lifespan. In March 2024, Kennedy named Shanahan as his running mate in his presidential campaign. Shanahan has questioned the scientific consensus on vaccine safety and efficacy.
Early life Nicole Ann Shanahan was born to Shawn and Amy Shanahan (née Wong) in Placer County, California, on September 26, 1985. She grew up in Oakland, California. In a 2023 interview, she said she had a "very hard" childhood marked by traumatic experiences and poverty. Shanahan said her father, a computer specialist of German and Irish descent who died in 2014, had bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression, and struggled with substance abuse. Shanahan's mother was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. from Guangzhou in the 1980s; she worked as a maid before becoming an accountant. Shanahan has a younger brother. Shanahan attended Saint Mary's College High School, a private Catholic school in Berkeley, California. She then moved to Tacoma, Washington, where she earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Puget Sound in 2007. At the university, she studied Asian studies, economics, and Mandarin Chinese. Shanahan worked as a paralegal and patent specialist (the latter at defensive patent aggregator RPX Corp.) before attending Santa Clara University School of Law, from which she graduated with a J.D. in 2014. She has said that while working at RPX Corp. one of her male co-workers sexually assaulted her, and that shortly after this she became severely depressed and left RPX Corp. a month before its IPO.
Career While in law school, Shanahan 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. She sold the company to a competitor, IPwe, in 2020, in exchange for an estimated $20 million in IPwe stock; IPwe went bankrupt in 2024. Shanahan has spoken about 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 and Evolver. 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. Also 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.
Bia-Echo and advocacy In 2018, Shanahan helped fund and launch the Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality within the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. In 2019, she established her private foundation, Bia-Echo. It 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. Before their divorce, Brin donated more than $20 million to Bia-Echo, much of it from shares of Alphabet (Google's parent company). He made another contribution to the foundation in 2021, but did not contribute 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 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. She 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.
Political contributions and involvement before 2024 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 Ro Khanna's congressional campaigns. In 2020, she was a "major donor" to Measure J, a criminal justice reform referendum in Los Angeles County. Also in 2020, she contributed $150,000 to support George Gascón's campaign for Los Angeles County District Attorney. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Shanahan contributed $2,800 each to the campaigns of Marianne Williamson and Pete Buttigieg. She co-hosted a fundraiser for Buttigieg in December 2019, along with other wealthy Silicon Valley figures. After Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee, she supported his campaign, contributing $25,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, and a five-figure sum to the Democratic National Committee.
Role in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign
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