Tom Pritzker was born and raised in Chicago. He holds a B.A. from Claremont Men’s College, an MBA and J.D. degree from the University of Chicago. He resides in Chicago with his wife Margot.

Tom is Executive Chairman of The Pritzker Organization. For more than 20 years, he served as Executive Chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation (NYSE: H) and began his senior executive and Chairman responsibilities for predecessor entities starting in 1980. He also Chaired and helped to reorganize Marmon Industries, a family industrial company. Over his career he has been involved in acquiring and building companies in a number of different industries. In addition, he was a founder of significant companies in the fields of container leasing (Triton), biotech (Bay City Capital) and health care (Reliant Pharmaceuticals and First Health). In 2022, Tom and his wife Margot established The Margot and Tom Pritzker Science Foundation, reimagining how philanthropy can strengthen the ecosystems that transform curiosity into pathbreaking science.

Outside of business, Pritzker is active in a number of areas. In national security, for 11 years he was Chairman of Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington DC where he fundamentally restructured the institution. He is also a member of the Aspen Strategy Group. In culture and education, he is Chairman of the Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the Pritzker Architecture Prize and previously a member of the boards of trustees at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. In science, he was deeply involved in conceptualizing and helping to build from a white paper what is now the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. He was also the founder of the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium. Pritzker is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pritzker has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is an Honorary Professor of History and for a number of years was an adjunct professor of history at Sichuan University in China. For the past 40+ years Pritzker has been leading archeological expeditions and publishing original research in the field of Western Himalayan history.