physician-executive
(10)
Shareh Ghani Turned Behavioral Health Into a Data Problem Worth Solving
From the ACT teams of Maricopa County to the C-suite of a national managed care company, Shareh Ghani built a career on a stubborn idea: that good care and good data are the same project.
Gerald Denny Still Sees Patients Between Board Meetings
A practicing nephrologist who runs the medical side of a $1.9 billion device business, and still keeps a standing clinic day.
Steve Steinberg
Steve Steinberg is a San Diego nephrologist who helped grow Balboa Nephrology Medical Group from a tiny two-physician practice into the largest nephrology group in California, now spanning roughly 60 board-certified nephrologists, dozens of clinical offices and scores of dialysis clinics. As CEO-Medical Director he has steered Balboa toward value-based kidney care, where the group posts some of the strongest national outcomes in CMS and CMMI programs, while championing the idea that kidney patients should never feel alone in their care.
Sanuj Ravindran
Sanuj Ravindran, M.D., is the CEO of Simcha Therapeutics, a New Haven clinical-stage immunobiology company turning a once-overlooked immune molecule, interleukin-18, into a cancer weapon. A board-certified physician who spent a decade as a venture capitalist before becoming a serial biotech company-builder, Ravindran took the helm in 2022 to push ST-067, a decoy-resistant IL-18 designed to slip past the body's own off-switch and reawaken the immune system inside tumors. He has run drug programs across oncology and rare disease, structured more than $2 billion in deals, and bets his career on therapies that promise more than incremental gains.
Alastair Blake
Alastair Blake is the Chief Business Officer of Layer Health, an MIT-spinout building an AI layer for clinical chart review backed by Google Ventures, General Catalyst and Define Ventures. A Cambridge-trained physician (MD, MRCP) turned commercial operator, he trained as an internal medicine doctor in the NHS, served a National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship at the Care Quality Commission, earned an MBA from Wharton, consulted at McKinsey, and led clinical and commercial partnerships at the healthcare data company nference before joining Layer Health in 2024. He sits at the intersection of medicine, data and go-to-market - a doctor who now sells the software meant to give doctors their time back.
Neil Barman
Neil Barman is a physician-executive and the Chief Executive Officer of Sound Blade Medical, a Halifax-based startup building handheld histotripsy devices that use focused ultrasound to liquify tissue without heat or incisions. A Stanford- and Northwestern-trained M.D., he has spent more than two decades turning early medical-device science into approved therapies, including a pivotal role in the first FDA approval of ultrasound renal denervation at ReCor Medical and early roles at companies later acquired by Medtronic and Stryker. He stepped up from COO to CEO at Sound Blade in July 2025 to steer its non-invasive surgery platform through clinical development.
Omar Dawood
Omar Dawood is the CEO and board member of Huddle Up, the pediatric digital health company formerly known as DotCom Therapy. A physician with four degrees and a long run through the digital mental-health world (Ginger, Calm, BetterUp), he now leads a team delivering speech, occupational, mental-health and special-education therapy to children across nearly 1,000 US school districts. Under his watch the company rebranded, closed a Series C led by Kayne Anderson Growth Capital, and crossed one million care sessions.
Rahul Rajkumar
Rahul Rajkumar is the founder and CEO of Accompany Health, a Bethesda, Maryland company delivering home-based, technology-enabled primary, behavioral, and social care to low-income Americans with complex needs, especially dual-eligible Medicare-Medicaid patients. A Yale-trained physician and lawyer who holds an MD and a JD, he spent 15 years redesigning how the U.S. pays for and delivers care, from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to chief medical officer roles at CareFirst and Blue Cross North Carolina and COO of Optum Care Solutions. Accompany Health launched in January 2024 with $56 million in Series A funding led by Venrock, ARCH Venture Partners, and IVP.
Vik Vaz
Vik Vaz is a physician-turned-executive who became CEO and President of San Diego multi-omics biotech Pleno Inc. in December 2024, arriving the same day the company closed a $25M Series B. Trained as a surgeon and interventional oncologist, he later ran strategy and companion diagnostics at Illumina and was a partner at both McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. At Pleno he is commercializing the RAPTOR platform, which uses proprietary Hypercoding technology to detect DNA, RNA and protein targets in a single sample at high speed and low cost.
Hal Paz
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.