What better way to honor Women’s History Month than celebrating powerful women in the life sciences? Come to WIB-Greater Boston’s famous 9th Annual Lobster Pot. As the name suggests, this event will be in the “shark tank style,” with each fundraising executive pitching to investors and the audience. The investors will provide feedback on the pitch and comment on the ideas presented. Join us to learn how to pitch to investors more effectively and check out some exciting NewCos in the life sciences space.  So whether you are starting your own company, raising money, or want to celebrate powerful women, this is one event that you can’t afford to miss.

Program

4:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Registration
5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. Intros and Pitch
6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. Networking

VCs

Shahila Christie, Managing Director of Strategic Growth at Portal Innovations

Shahila leverages her extensive experience, spanning both academia and entrepreneurship, to lead Portal Innovations' expansion efforts. Through the first decade of her 20-year career, she pursued research as an academic, gaining valuable insights into the scientific landscape. She then transitioned to the entrepreneurial realm, founding a spin-off company based on her own intellectual property. This experience ignited her passion for the intersection of science and business. Following her venture, Shahila has held various roles, including consulting for startups, further solidifying her expertise in supporting early-stage companies. In her current role, Shahila draws upon her diversified background to lead Portal Innovations' expansion initiative. This entails analyzing local life science ecosystems and developing and implementing the company's proven approach to nurture early-stage technologies and cultivate them into successful businesses. Beyond her professional contributions, Shahila actively participates in the Women In Bio organization, holding leadership positions, including serving as the Chicago Chapter President in 2020. Shahila holds a PhD in biochemistry and completed postdoctoral research in small molecule drug discovery and development.

Marian Nakada, Vice President of Venture Investments JJDC at Johnson & Johnson

Marian Nakada has over 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, starting her career at the laboratory bench at Centocor and moving to a research leadership role before Centocor’s acquisition by Johnson & Johnson. She later transitioned to Janssen business development and eventually joined JJDC in 2013. Marian has an AB in biology from Harvard and a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Pennsylvania. She has authored 62 peer-reviewed publications and 14 book chapters and is a past reviewer for the NIH Pharmacology Study Section. She is currently on the Boards of Navitor and a stealth NewCo and is a Board Observer for ONL Therapeutics, Aetion, Iterative Health, and Rome. Marian is also on the Board of the New England Venture Capital Association and co-founder of IgniteVC, where she is working to champion change through its diversity & inclusion efforts. Outside work, Marian is a Board Member at InnerCity Weightlifting, whose mission is to amplify the voice and agency of people who have been most impacted by systemic racism and mass incarceration.

Stella Paffenholz, Venture Capital Associate at Nextech Invest

Stella is an Associate at Nextech Invest, a global, molecular medicine-focused venture capital firm. Nextech focuses on precision medicine approaches in oncology and beyond with the goal to drive value creation for portfolio companies and improve therapeutic options for patients. Prior to Nextech, Stella gained experience in venture creation at Apollo Health Ventures, management consulting at McKinsey, and in-house consulting at Merck KGaA. Stella holds a BS in molecular biomedicine from the University of Bonn, an MS in molecular biosciences from the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg as a Helmholtz Fellow, and a PhD from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York with her research focused on cancer genetics. Throughout her studies, Stella was supported by a fellowship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Outside of work, Stella can be found running, cycling, or swimming to train for her next marathon or triathlon.

Chaya Patel, PhD, Associate at Mission BioCapital

Chaya Patel is an Associate at Mission BioCapital, an early-stage life science venture firm. In her role, she focuses on company creation efforts and new investment opportunities. She also serves on the Boston leadership team for the Emerging Venture Capitalists Association (EVCA). Prior to joining the firm in 2021, Chaya worked for a family office and later with their portfolio company, Alloy Therapeutics. Chaya holds a PhD in microbiology and immunology from Dartmouth, where her graduate research yielded new discoveries for how vaccine and antibody therapeutics can be repurposed for neonatal viral infections. Chaya received her BS in microbiology and immunology from UCLA.

Katie Bodner Spielberg, Senior Associate at 5AM Ventures

Katie joined 5AM Ventures in 2021 as an Analyst and was promoted to Senior Associate in 2023. Prior to joining 5AM, she completed both a postdoctoral fellowship and a PhD in Markus Covert's lab in the Bioengineering department at Stanford University. As a recipient of the Hertz Foundation Fellowship and Stanford Graduate Fellowship, she studied how bacterial viruses help the immune system clear bacterial infections. Dr. Spielberg's work has been published in Cell Systems and Nature Chemical Biology among others. She received her BS in biological engineering from MIT with Tau Beta Pi honors. Dr. Spielberg is based in the Boston, MA office.

Pitches

Katerina Chatzi, Founder & CEO of Promakhos

Katerina is a distinguished scientist-entrepreneur with expertise in immunology, protein secretion, biochemistry, bacteriology, cell biology, and business development. She has performed biomedical research for over 15 years across four different countries, uncovering fundamental principles underlying bacterial secretion, protein folding, antibiotic resistance, and cell cycle regulation. Katerina’s scientific journey started at the University of Crete, where she studied mechanisms underlying tolerogenic immunosuppression during pregnancy in mice. She then received an Erasmus fellowship to study antibiotic resistance at Uppsala University in Sweden. Returning to Greece, she received the Excellent Academic Performance Award and started her PhD training to study and reconstitute bacterial secretion systems. For her work, she was awarded the prestigious Heraclitus II fellowship from the National Strategic Innovation Program. Katerina then continued her research on bacterial secretion and protein folding as a Research fellow at the KU Leuven in Belgium. Katerina arrived in the United States of America to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. Recognizing her passion for translational research, she engaged in various business development programs across the Harvard and Massachusetts ecosystems. Through her exposure to different scientific fields as well as clinical and business environments, Katerina realized how her skills can help in the development of novel immunomodulatory therapeutics. She assembled a team and founded Promakhos Therapeutics to carry out her vision.

Floris Engelhardt, Co-Founder & CEO of Kano Therapeutics

Floris Engelhardt is co-founder and CEO of Kano Therapeutics, a biotech startup spun out of Professor Mark Bathe’s BioNano Lab at MIT, where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher after obtaining her Doctoral Degree from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Her background is in DNA nanotechnology. Her PhD and post-doc focused on DNA origami design developing application-specific DNA origami purification techniques, as well as biotechnological single-stranded DNA production for CRISPR applications.

Grace Tiao, E9 Genomics

Grace Tiao spent the last decade at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she led the production team for the Genome Aggregation Database, the world’s largest public dataset of human genetic variation and the default resource used in clinical variant interpretation pipelines around the world. She is a product manager and computational biologist who has contributed to research published in a range of journals, including Nature, Nature Genetics, and Nature Biotechnology. Grace studied mathematics and statistics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and has a BA from Harvard College.

Amy Yee, CEO & Founder of Cha Therapeutics, inc

Dr. Amy Yee is the CEO and Founder of Cha Therapeutics and is a tenured full Professor at Tufts University. Cha Therapeutics is the entrepreneurial vehicle that brings her expertise and work to benefit cancer patients. After AB and PhD degrees in biochemistry (UC Berkeley; UC Davis) and a fellowship in cancer biology (Rockefeller University), she now has 25+ years of expertise in cancer biology with emphasis on breast cancers, cell signaling, epigenetics, and drug discovery. In her lab, she and her team discovered the lead compound Cha1 as a culmination of years of study into the mechanisms of breast cancer, brain metastases, and now hematologic malignancies. She has been awarded >10M in federal and private grant support and has served extensively as a grant reviewer for numerous federal, private, and international agencies. She has received numerous research awards and reviewer recognition, including from the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, Tufts University, and Peking University. With her extensive and practical expertise in cancer biology and drug discovery, she launched Cha Therapeutics after acquiring the IP from Tufts University. She hopes to make a dramatic impact on cancer patient outcomes and quality of life.

Jamie Zhan, Founder and President of Treasure Biosciences

Jamie Zhan, has extensive and diverse experiences in business strategy and management in the life science industry. Jamie began her career in management consulting at Kinapse (London, UK) and IQVIA (Singapore), where she assisted global large Pharma and biotech companies in navigating development and growth strategies. After transitioning to in-house roles in 2016, Jamie structured and led new operations in business and strategy development at both large private and public life science technology companies in China and the US. Jamie received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and an MPH in health management from Harvard University. Now a seasoned and passionate entrepreneur, she has led very early-stage biotech start-ups to secure significant investments from dilutive and non-dilutive sources and has forged strategic alliances, propelling the companies to prominence in a fast-progressing environment.  

Ananya Zutshi, Co-Founder & CEO of Guardian Bio

Ananya founded Guardian Bio alongside her co-founders, Ricky Barrett, PhD, and Karolina Palucka, MD, PhD, while a Blavatnik Fellow at Harvard Business School. She is passionate about using exciting science to bring life-changing therapies to market for patients. Her experiences in early-stage investing and the contract manufacturing and development side of the pharma/biotech industry in roles across operations, engineering, business development, and project management have given her a holistic view of a complex industry. Ananya graduated with distinction from Duke University with a BSE in biomedical engineering and received both an MBA and MS in engineering sciences from Harvard.

Pricing Information

• Members: $35
• Non-members*: $50

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Note: A confirmation email will be sent after registration has been completed. 

Special Pricing for Guests

Members can register guests at member prices.

Walk-Ins Accepted?

Yes

Maximum Capacity

150

Parking Information

Plenty of free parking in the BACK of the building!

Public Transit Information

The venue is a 5-minute walk from the JFK/UMass Red Line T stop (you will walk past the Star Market).

Sponsors