Stasia Obremskey
Before joining, Stasia served in 2018 as the first Fellow of the Tara Health Foundation. She has more than twenty-five years of experience providing financial and strategic planning consulting to organizations in the U.S. and Asia. She has joined management teams as the interim Chief Financial Officer on a short term and extended term basis to provide finance, accounting and strategic planning expertise to startups, fast growing companies and non-profit organizations. Current and past clients include 18Birdies, Posit Science, Circlepoint, West Shore Technologies and We Care Solar. She has lived for over 8 years in Bangkok, Thailand and Hong Kong, China. She began her consulting career as a management consultant with Bain & Company. Previously, she worked in investment banking for Morgan Stanley & Co. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a concentration in finance from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. In addition to her consulting work, she has extensive experience as a member of several nonprofit boards where she has held a number of leadership positions.
Amy Welsh
Bill Gruber
Bill Gruber joined Solace Therapeutics in August 2011 as President and CEO. Prior to this role, he co-founded Interlace Medical in August 2006 and served as their President and CEO until Interlace was acquired by Hologic in January 2011. Bill has extensive experience in organizational development and in product development for rapid growth businesses. Prior to Interlace, Bill spent five years at Cortek Inc., a spinal products company. As Cortek’s V.P. of Sales and Marketing, he built sales from $612K to over $10M. During his last two years, he was the V.P. of New Business Development and Marketing. In this role, he was instrumental in creating Soteira, a Cortek subsidiary, focused on devices for treating vertebral compression fractures. Prior to Cortek, Bill spent 10 years at Boston Scientific Corporation. Before leaving Boston Scientific Corporation, he held the position of Director of the $172M Global Atherosclerotic Therapy business. Prior to entering the medical device sector, Bill spent five years in sales and marketing roles at Procter and Gamble.
Chandra P. Leo
Chandra P. Leo is a member of the private equity team at HBM Partners, a Swiss-based healthcare investment firm with approximately $1.8 billion in assets under management. He has been responsible for investments in more than 15 private biotech, medical device and diagnostics companies in the United States and Europe, in most cases as a board member or board observer. Collectively, these companies have so far generated five NASDAQ IPOs, five M&A transactions and four FDA-approved marketed products.
In the women’s health field, Chandra has backed and worked with companies focused on e.g. cervical cancer, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, gynecologic infections, urogynecologic conditions, infertility and preterm labor. Before becoming a venture capital investor, he served as a physician in the Dept. of OB/GYN at the University Hospital in Leipzig, Germany, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in reproductive biology at Stanford University.
Chandra holds degrees as a Doctor of Medicine from the Freie Universität Berlin (Charité), a Master in Medicines Development (MAS) from the University of Basel, and an MBA with distinction from INSEAD (France/Singapore). He lives in Zurich with his wife (a gynecologist) and their two daughters.
Allison Conti
Allison Watkins-Conti is an award winning mentor and serial entrepreneur with a background in marketing & advertising, construction trades and real estate. In 2015, Allison conceived a solution for an issue that affects an estimated 1 in 3 women, worldwide. She designed, patented, engineered and manufactured a solution that is entering the FDA approval process. Allison has global intellectual property protection for multiple products, has developed a quality management system, a contract manufacturing facility, conducted studies validating safety and efficacy, and employs some of the top industry leaders in the U.S. Today, Allison develops products to address taboo issues facing women across the globe.
Elizabeth Garner
Tenesha Duncan
Barbara Dehn
Barb Dehn is a practicing Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner in Silicon Valley and a television health expert, who’s known as Nurse Barb on NBC’s California Live. An award winning author, active in Social Media and YouTube, Barb earned a masters degree from UCSF and a BS from Boston College. She is certified by the North American Menopause Society and is a Fellow in the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. She works on Global Health Initiatives at FAME Hospital in Karatu, Tanzania, where she serves on their board and as a volunteer.
Jannine Versi
Andrea S. Lukes, MD, MHSc, FACOG
Dr. Andrea S. Lukes is a board-certified OB/GYN, a Fellow of The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and an expert on clinical development of women’s health products across a wide range of indications across the female lifecycle. Her areas of expertise include but are not limited to endometrial ablation, endometriosis, hysteroscopy, minimally invasive gynecology, bleeding disorders, uterine fibroids, contraception, menopause and vasomotor symptoms, hereditary cancer screening and prenatal counseling. Dr. Lukes advises Health Decisions and our clients on development and implementation of research protocols as well as communications and presentations to the FDA.
An experienced principal investigator in industry-sponsored, NIH and CDC clinical trials, Dr. Lukes has conducted or overseen more than 90 clinical trials of investigational women’s health products, including both drugs and devices. Recent experience includes studies of sedation during hysteroscopic tissue removal, treatment of anemia associated with uterine leiomyomas, treatment of vulvovaginal atrophy, transcervical ablation of uterine fibroids, combination drug therapy for management of menstrual bleeding associated with uterine fibroids in premenopausal women, a vapor treatment for excessive uterine bleeding, analgesia for endometriosis-associated pain, pain management during endometrial biopsy, and migraine.
Dr. Lukes’ articles have appeared in journals including Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Fertility and Sterility, the Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology, Women’s Health, Women’s Healthcare, Contemporary OB/GYN, the International Journal of Women’s Health, Cancer, the British Journal of Hematology, the Journal of Medicine, Current Medical Research & Opinion and Drug Safety. She has served on advisory committees for FDA meetings on topics including a clinician’s perspective on thromboembolism, heavy menstrual bleeding and alkaline hematin assessment, and clinical trial design for treatment of vaginal laxity and female sexual dysfunction.
Dr. Lukes founded the Carolina Women’s Research and Wellness Center (CWRWC), a leading private gynecologic practice and clinical research center. She also co-founded and served as the Director of Gynecology for the Women’s Hemostasis and Thrombosis Clinic at the Duke University Medical Center and founded and chaired the OB/GYN Alliance, an online network of 8,000 OB/GYN physicians in the United States.
Dr. Lukes received a bachelor’s degree and a combined medical degree and master’s degree in statistics from Duke University. She completed her residency at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.