Erika Cheung

Erika Cheung
Nationality	American
Occupation	Ethics advocate, former laboratory scientist, nonprofit executive
Known for	One of the whistleblowers who reported Theranos to regulators; co-founder and executive director of Ethics in Entrepreneurship
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Website	https://ethicsinentrepreneurship.org

Erika Cheung is an American ethics advocate and former laboratory scientist who was one of the whistleblowers who reported the blood-testing company Theranos to federal regulators. As a young laboratory employee she documented reliability problems with the company's technology and later became a source for the reporting that exposed the company, and she testified for the government in the criminal fraud trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. She is the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Ethics in Entrepreneurship.

Early life and education

Cheung was educated largely through homeschooling and began attending community college at the age of 14. She went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a dual degree in molecular and cell biology and linguistics, graduating in 2013.

Theranos

Role and concerns

Cheung joined Theranos in 2013, shortly after graduating, having been recruited through a job fair at Berkeley. She began as an entry-level laboratory associate and worked on validating test results produced by the company's proprietary blood-testing devices, known as Edison machines.

During her time in the laboratory, Cheung observed that the company's devices repeatedly failed quality-control checks yet were still used to process patient samples. She has said that quality-control exercises failed at a high rate and that staff were encouraged to delete results treated as outliers before reporting them. She raised her concerns internally, including with Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, but the issues were not resolved to her satisfaction. A colleague, Tyler Shultz, the grandson of Theranos board member George Shultz, raised similar concerns during the same period. Cheung left the company after roughly seven months, resigning in April 2014.

Whistleblowing

After leaving Theranos, Cheung became an anonymous source for the investigative reporter John Carreyrou, whose reporting for The Wall Street Journal first publicly detailed problems at the company in 2015. When the company threatened her with legal action over the alleged disclosure of trade secrets, she sought legal advice and was counseled to report what she had witnessed to federal health regulators. She subsequently reported her concerns to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency responsible for regulating clinical laboratories. The resulting regulatory inspection contributed to sanctions against Theranos and the shutdown of its clinical laboratory operations.

Elizabeth Holmes trial testimony

Cheung testified for the prosecution in United States v. Elizabeth Holmes, the federal criminal fraud trial of the Theranos founder, appearing as one of the government's early witnesses on September 15 and 16, 2021. She testified that data manipulation at the company occurred "frequently" and that employees would delete up to two of six data points in a test in order to reach a desired result. Charts introduced by the government indicated that approximately 25 percent of tests run on the Theranos technology failed quality control in 2014, and Cheung testified that conventional, FDA-approved devices rarely failed by comparison. Holmes was subsequently convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy.

Ethics in Entrepreneurship

Cheung is a co-founder and the executive director of Ethics in Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit organization she helped launch around 2018 in response to her experience at Theranos. The organization describes its mission as embedding ethical questioning, culture and systems within startups and innovation ecosystems, and works with founders, employees, investors and other stakeholders to make ethical practice more accessible and practical for early-stage companies. In its early period the organization operated with limited staffing and funding as Cheung built out its programs.

Other work

Cheung has worked in the technology sector in Asia, based in Hong Kong, where she was a founding team member of the startup accelerator Betatron and worked on developing the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region. She has also worked as an independent consultant on healthcare and biotechnology projects supporting technology entrepreneurs across Asia.

Public speaking and media

Cheung has spoken publicly about her experience and about business ethics, including in a TED talk titled "Theranos, whistleblowing and speaking truth to power," in which she recounts her decision to come forward and outlines a framework intended to help others act when confronted with ethical problems in their organizations. Her role in the Theranos case has been documented in John Carreyrou's book Bad Blood, the podcast The Dropout, and the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.

In 2024, Cheung was a panelist at the inaugural White Collar Conference, appearing on the "Out of Isolation" panel.