Spotlight on Women in Health Ventures

Tia Lyles-Williams is founder and CEO of LucasPye Bio, the first large-scale biotechnology/biopharmaceutical company to be led by an African American woman. As a contract development manufacturing organization (or CDMO), LucasPye Bio currently offers a wide range of services to its clients, including proprietary cell line development, bioprocess development, consulting, and cGLP small scale biopro...

Jaye Goldstein is the head of program at Petri. Before coming to Petri, she founded the MIT Communication Lab along with the Department of Biological Engineering. This lab was created in an effort to teach scientists and engineers to communicate effectively. Jaye created the bridge between the School of Engineering and the Communication lab, making it a resource for emerging scientists and enginee...

Liya Shuster-Bier is the founder and CEO of Alula, the radically honest resource making cancer less lonely. On January 11, 2018, on the cusp of her 30th birthday, six months after graduating from Wharton, Liya was diagnosed with a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Taking the knowledge gained from her experience, Liya built Alula to support people, families, and friends through the entire lifecycl...

Maria Luisa Pineda is the Co-founder and CEO of Envisagenics, which was founded in 2014 as a spinout of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Given that there are over 30 million people in the United States who suffer from genetic diseases or cancer, which could be caused by mutations affecting RNA splicing, Envisagenics aims to accelerate the development of innovative therapeutic solutions for RNA splic...

Dawn Barry is the president and co-founder of LunaPBC, which is the public benefit corporation that launched LunaDNA, the first DNA and health research platform owned by its community of data donors. LunaDNA's member-owned digital data-sharing community makes discovery representative of the real world and aligned with people’s true goals by giving all individuals a role in research. Previously, Da...

Alyssa Jaffee is a Partner at 7wireVentures where she focuses on investments in digital healthcare and technology-enabled services that empower consumers to be better stewards of their health in today’s changing healthcare ecosystem. Alyssa sits on the board of Ayogo Health and Higi and is a board observer with Zerigo Health, NOCD, Jasper Health, and RecoveryOne. Alyssa’s prior experience in ventu...

Dr. Lara Devgan is a top board-certified New York City plastic surgeon and the founder and CEO of luxury medical-grade skincare line Dr. Devgan Scientific Beauty. She is an international lecturer, a renowned industry consultant, a classically trained artist, and an expert in plastic surgery and injectables for the face, breasts, and body. She is the former Chief Medical Officer of RealSelf, the la...

Robin McIntosh is a designer, author and social impact entrepreneur. She has founded multiple companies, and has worked across startups, brands, and business communities over the past decade, with a focus on the arts, health and wellness. Currently, she serves as co-founder and co-CEO of Workit Health, where she and her co-founder Lisa McLaughlin develop digital therapeutic programs and precision...

Dr. Lisa Bard Levine served as the former CEO of The MAVEN Project, a telehealth nonprofit that supports primary care providers in delivering comprehensive care to vulnerable patients at community health centers across the country. Her team recruits and retains experienced volunteer physicians who work closely with front line providers to educate, advise, and enhance local care capacity through pr...

Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph. D., M.B.A, is President of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet company whose mission is to apply digital solutions that enable people to enjoy healthier lives. A passionate champion of improving health in the U.S. and worldwide, she works closely with Verily’s clinical and engineering teams to develop products and platforms that support the successful tra...

Dr. Leila Strickland is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of BIOMILQ, a women-owned, science-led, and parent-centered infant nutrition company based in Durham, North Carolina. With her co-founder, Michelle Egger, Dr. Strickland is disrupting the over $65 billion infant formula market through culturing mammary gland cells in a lab. Despite its recent formation in January 2020, BIOMILQ has...

Vernita Brown is CEO of Natalist, a venture-backed women’s health startup focused on supporting women from concept to conception. Their fertility products and resources are backed by science with a net-zero plastic footprint. Prior to Natalist, Vernita spent a decade working with organizations and businesses like Teach for America and United Way in positions of leadership, asset management, progra...

Arlan Hamilton is founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital, a venture fund dedicated to minimizing funding disparities by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or members of the LGBTQ community. Since its founding in 2015, Backstage has invested more than $20 million in more than 180 companies with plans to raise up to $30 million for its newest fund. In...

Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD, is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and adjunct clinical professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford. She previously worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and as a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health. At a16z, she works with companies seeking to improve how drug development and patient care delivery is...

Sachin Jain, MD, MBA is President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, where he is charged with leading the organization’s growth, diversification, and emerging efforts to reduce healthcare disparities. Previously, Dr. Jain was President and CEO of CareMore and Aspire Health, innovative care delivery systems with > $1.6B in revenues serving 200,000 Medicare and Medicaid patients and 2500 asso...

Jun Axup is the Chief Science Officer and Partner at IndieBio, the world’s leading biotech startup accelerator. Focused on turning scientists into entrepreneurs, IndieBio has funded and helped build 100+ biotech companies spanning the future of food/agriculture, consumer biotech, computational biology, digital health, therapeutics, medical devices, neurotech, and regenerative medicine. In this epi...

Dr. Dana Kanze is an accomplished professor at London Business School, specializing in organizational behavior and gender inequality within the workplace. Her internationally accredited TED Talk entitled, “The real reason female entrepreneurs get less funding,” has spurred many important discussions surrounding the biases that investors carry within their evaluation of start-up ventures. We discus...

Dr. Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, poet, medical doctor and author. Serving as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she investigated disease outbreaks as principal investigator on a number of studies. Previously she was a science correspondent at The Dallas Morning News, medical analyst for CNN, and professor of...

Angela Lee is an educator, entrepreneur, and investor. Angela is a Professor of Practice and the Chief Innovation Officer at Columbia Business School, where she teaches courses on leadership and venture capital. She started her career in product management and then moved onto strategy consulting at McKinsey. She is the founder of four startups, including the NYC-based investor network called 37 An...

Dr. Nadine Hachach-Haram is a London-based consultant plastic and reconstructive surgeon and the founder of Proximie, a technology platform that allows clinicians to virtually 'scrub in' to any operating room from anywhere in the world. This augmented reality platform allows health professionals to teach, train, and collaborate remotely, thus digitizing a given surgeon's footprint and creating a b...

Nearly 700,000 Americans suffer an ischemic stroke each year, and though tPA has been approved for over 25 years to treat ischemic strokes, only 5-10% of eligible patients receive this therapy due to delays in seeking medical attention. Alva Health is developing a wearable device to help older Americans living with high stroke risk monitor and detect signs of stroke. Founder and CEO Dr. Sandra Sal...

Dr. Natalie Ma is co-founder and director of business development at Felix Biotechnology, a seed-stage biotechnology company working to accelerate its deployment of novel biotherapeutics to manage infectious diseases using their proprietary phage technology. She helped launch Felix Biotech with Dr. Paul Turner when she was a Blavatnik Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Yale Tech Transfer Office. Na...

During the pandemic, Theia has talked with more than a dozen of healthcare professionals, leaders, and innovators. We wanted to share what we have discussed and learned from our podcast guests with respect to Covid-19 and its effects on healthcare through this episode. This piece aims to share how entrepreneurs adapted their ventures to the events of the pandemic, reflect on how the pandemic revea...

Dr. Jerrica Kirkley is co-founder and CMO of Plume, a direct-to-consumer telehealth company that provides medical consultation and gender-affirming hormone therapy for transgender patients. As a trans woman, family practice physician and educator, Dr. Kirkley and her co-founder, Dr. Matthew Wetschler, started Plume in 2019 to radically increase access to gender-affirmation services. Plume is curre...

Avisi Technologies is a University of Pennsylvania spinout company developing a nanoscale, ocular implant called VisiPlate to stop blindness in patients with glaucoma. CEO Rui Jing Jiang co-founded Avisi while completing her undergraduate business degree at Wharton. What began as a business project turned into a full-time endeavor. We talk about how to leverage the resources at your academic insti...