Not just what —
but how.

Setting a research agenda your foundation can execute — and defend.

We start not with the literature but with the field — structured conversations with your investigators, your clinicians, and the pharma partners who have or haven't engaged. At the Jain Foundation, I contributed to a team-driven effort to build and steward a portfolio of ten-plus programs targeting treatment development — disease mechanisms, pre-clinical and clinical testing, patient diagnosis, and registry infrastructure. The portfolio's power was its diversity: by simultaneously addressing every requirement for therapy development — scientific, clinical, and regulatory - the goal was to de-risk the disease and make it amenable for pharmaceutical companies to bring a therapy to market, in alignment with FDA.

I form my own view and present it with a recommendation, not a summary. Foundation boards need someone who will take a position and stand behind it.

Building the connective tissue that turns isolated researchers into a field.

We begin with a landscape assessment — who is working on what, where the expertise nodes are, and where relationships that should exist don't. The output isn't just a report; it's introductions, conference programs, data sharing agreements, and collaborative proposals that wouldn't have happened otherwise. We pay particular attention to the gap between academic labs and patient organizations: investigators underestimate how much patient registries and community trust accelerate their science; patient organizations underestimate how much researcher engagement builds the credibility that funders respond to.

Keeping a multi-site research program honest, rigorous, and on track.

At Wellcome Leap's 1kD program, I coordinated ten global sites with a single data governance structure built at the start so the program spent its time managing science, not managing confusion. At Dup15q foundation I conducted scientific evaluation, synthesizing findings into board recommendations, and communicating the difficult ones to investigators without damaging long-term relationships. I am a the scientific evaluator and the program manager — when I read a progress report, I understand what's being said, what isn't, and whether the milestone was genuinely met or met on paper.

Getting your program to the point where a clinical trial becomes possible.

Most rare disease foundations are further from clinical trial readiness than they realize — and closer than pharma's silence suggests. Our contribution at this stage is diagnostic: we assesses where the field genuinely stands against the questions a trial sponsor would ask, and identifies the specific gaps standing between the current research portfolio and a credible development conversation. We provide support designing trial-ready cohorts from registry and natural history datasets, structuring the data in ways that make patient populations legible and enrollment viable to external partners.

This is preparation work, not execution — and done rigorously, it's what makes the difference between a foundation that waits for pharma to come to them and one that earns the conversation.

Keeping the patient voice central — and making sure the science earns their trust.

I approach patient engagement as a two-way relationship: before communicating research findings to a community, I listen to what they actually need — what their daily realities are, what the gap is between what they're being told and what they understand. That listening shapes both content and tone. I have presented research updates at patient conferences across the US and India, managed social media channels for rare disease communities, and communicated difficult news with the care those conversations require. I can walk out of a patient conference into a meeting with a pharmaceutical business development team and write the board report summarizing both.