As a kid I dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. Perhaps cliché but my dog was truly my best friend. Nothing would have ever stopped me from caring for him to the point that the only time I was bitten by a dog was by trying to protect him. There was no way I would ever miss any visit to the veterinarian. I was fascinated by what seemed to me like the greatest job in the world!  In retrospect, the desire to care for others stayed with me through the years but not that I didn’t like animals anymore, it would be people that I wanted to care for and medicine would enable me to do that.

Medical school taught me a lot about physiology, diseases, diagnostics and treatments. It also taught me about people, courage and resilience.  In medicine, you see first-hand how a diagnosis can have a dramatic impact on an individual and their family, particularly when medicine has so little to offer for one’s condition.  What became obvious was the lack of potential treatment options for so many diseases.  At the same time, it highlighted the importance of therapeutics for patients where there were no drugs or other treatment modalities available.

I started to explore different ways I could make a difference through the combination of my medical background and business, which I had a keen interest in, which led me to take night classes first and eventually transitioning to a full time MBA.  It changed the course of my professional career!  Contrary to medical school, at the core of the MBA is teamwork and I was able to experience the synergy resulting from working with people of diverse professional backgrounds and work experience.  It was my first real exposure to entrepreneurship and provided the opportunity to meet with and learn from entrepreneurs who had built major companies and organizations across different industrial sectors.  Coming out of these early experiences I considered joining the ranks of big pharma but instead decided to move into investment banking which I hoped would eventually give me the opportunity to work in the slowly emerging biotech industry in Canada — and it did.

Along the way came the opportunity for me to join a fast-growing biotech company at a very exciting time in the industry. It’s one thing to be an advisor or consultant to a company, it is another to work within an organization. Working with great colleagues, I lived the highs and lows (fortunately more highs than lows) of a biotech company developing new drugs and vaccines and learned so much along the way.

What Drives Me Today

As a VC I am more than ever passionate about science and innovation as it relates to the development of new drugs and devices. I truly believe in the importance of the biotech industry as the main driver of innovation in the development of new medicines and it is a privilege to work with entrepreneurs and their team who share that passion.