Jacky Chan's path into venture capital started in an oncologist's office. His grandmother had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, and her doctor, wary of putting a patient her age through chemotherapy, recommended a newer targeted therapy instead. His grandmother is a survivor today. Jacky walked away with a question that has shaped everything since: how does a treatment like that actually make it from a lab to the patient who needs it?
It's a good question to start a fellowship on. It's also the question all four of the Science Center's new Venture Fellows are now asking, each from a different angle, as they begin a year inside the real work of early-stage investing.
They trained at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Pepperdine, and East Tennessee State University. Between them, they've scouted deals, run diligence, managed a student investment portfolio, shaped customer strategy for a Fortune Global 100 brand, and built a company from scratch. None of them are from the Philadelphia region originally. All four chose it, and their reasons make a sharp case for this market.
Here's who they are, what they'll be doing over the next 12 months, and what they're watching that the rest of the market might be missing.
No Spectators
Most fellowships let you watch. This one hands you the work.
The Venture Fellows Program is a 12-month, paid fellowship that embeds graduate students and early-career professionals at the Science Center with access to a network of over 100 startup alumni companies and 30+ active investors. Supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, it's built on a simple idea: you learn to think like an investor by doing an investor's job, and you become a better one by understanding what founders are actually up against.
The fellows run five workstreams at once. They embed with companies across our 100+ active alumni portfolio, from deep operating engagements to quick project sprints. They contribute to writing investment memos on early-stage life sciences, medtech, and health tech deals. Each month, they develop research on a dedicated slice of the market, becoming the team's go-to expert on it. They sit down for candid, structured conversations with practicing investors, the kind of judgment-building that never makes it into a textbook. And finally, they're writing an investment thesis on aging and longevity as if they were launching their own fund, to be defended at year end in front of a review board of investors and subject-matter experts.
It's a demanding year by design. Our portfolio companies get dedicated analytical horsepower at the stage they need it most. The fellows get a body of real, showable work. And Philadelphia gets something it can't import: a new generation of life sciences investors who learned the trade here.
Venture Fellows Barbara Neves, Yusuf Sulaiman, Azure Skye, and Jacky Chan catch up at the Science Center.
Meet our Venture Fellows
Jacky Chan: Getting Under the Hood
That question from his grandmother's diagnosis took Jacky to a student venture analyst internship at a state fund, then to GoAhead Ventures, where he scouted early-stage healthcare and biotech deals. He's now pursuing an MS in Biotechnology Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Johns Hopkins, building on a BS in Genetics, Genomics, and Biotechnology from Brigham Young University. His research interests read like a map of where medicine is headed: gene therapy delivery, aging and longevity, and AI-driven drug discovery.
But ask him where the market is underinvesting, and he points somewhere less glamorous.
"I think one of the most overlooked opportunities is the infrastructure behind healthcare and biotech, like health fintech and biomanufacturing. Most of the attention goes to the breakthrough drugs and devices, but those innovations can't be successful without the systems that support them."
It's a contrarian view with obvious logic, especially in a region investing heavily in manufacturing capacity. And when he evaluates a company, he starts with the people. "Founders who are deeply connected to the problem tend to be more resilient," he says. Given how his own story began, that one sounds earned.
Barbara Neves: The Go-To-Market Translator
Before she studied precision health, Barbara spent six years at Nestlé Nespresso, working her way up through CRM and project management roles across more than 50 international markets. That's a long way from an NIH-funded research program. Then again, so is the gap between a promising health innovation and a patient actually using it, and that gap is exactly where she wants to work.
"Venture felt like the place where both halves of my background meet," she says.
Barbara recently completed an MS in Precision Health with a concentration in Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago, where she was a Graduate Research Assistant on an NIH Precision for Precision Health study. In parallel, she worked with a Series A health tech company on its go-to-market strategy for expanding into clinical trials. The through line is a hard-won belief that in health innovation, the science is often not the bottleneck. Getting to market is.
Which explains what makes her wary. "What gives me pause is a great product with a vague path to adoption," she says. She pressure-tests growth stories and customer acquisition assumptions against how health systems actually buy, a habit any founder who has sat through a hospital procurement cycle will appreciate.
"A year from now I hope to have sharpened my investor's eye without losing my operator's instinct."
Azure Skye: The Whole Woman is the Whole Market
Ask Azure where the market isn't paying attention, and she answers in one word.
"Women. And I don't mean the current Femtech paradigm of fertility, postpartum, and menopause. I mean whole-body, whole-self-care: cardiac, cognitive, metabolic, autoimmune, and beyond."
She comes armed with the numbers to back it up. Heart disease kills more women than any other condition, yet in 2025, companies focused specifically on women's cardiovascular health raised only about $2 million. Meanwhile, most women's health funding remains concentrated in reproductive care and cancer. To Azure, that isn't a niche. It's white space.
She has seen the industry from several angles. Trained as a biologist at Pepperdine University, she went on to found and operate a tech-enabled wellness services company. As a fellow at longevity-focused fund LongGame Ventures, she helped stand up the firm's global launchpad, and through the Women's Founder Network, she led structured due diligence on early-stage tech companies. She was also selected as a VC University Life Sciences Scholar through UC Berkeley and the NVCA and is now completing her MBA. Her lesson from all of it: capital matters, but so do the relationships and networks around it.
That's what drew her here. Philadelphia, she says, feels layered and intentional in a way other ecosystems haven't, with real reach into New York, Boston, and DC. "To me, Philadelphia is a well-placed bridge connecting all of these, while keeping an identity and spirit that can't be replicated anywhere else."
Yusuf Sulaiman: The One Who Thinks Regulation is Fun
Most people come to health venture for the science and tolerate the regulation. Yusuf is the reverse.
Working at two generalist venture firms in the Southeast, he noticed the health deals kept pulling him in. "Health sciences deals were always the most fascinating as they required scrutinous analyses of regulatory and technological quality - and that's fun!" Along the way, he got a crash course in anatomy he never expected to need, from the spinal cord to the gut.
He graduated this spring from East Tennessee State University with a double major in Finance and Economics, in the top 10 of his class. In school, he founded and managed a $200,000 student investment portfolio. He interned at VentureSouth, one of the nation's most active angel groups, and since graduation has built deal flow infrastructure for his local Tennessee VCs. Thus, his interests run wide, with experience encompassing traditional asset management to early-stage investing.
Though there is one constant, his focus on rural applications, bringing a perspective that rarely makes it into coastal investment conversations: rural health. He points to maternal care deserts across the South and the Great Plains as one example of where innovation could step in while policy catches up. This year, he wants to go deep on the regulatory and policy side so he can help Science Center companies navigate it.
His goal for the fellowship is refreshingly plain. "A year from now I hope to simply be a more well-rounded professional, one who is literate on technological innovation, policy, and the finance underlying it."
The View From Outside
People who live in Philadelphia sometimes undersell it. People arriving tend not to.
Asked independently why they chose this ecosystem, the four fellows kept landing in the same places. Density, for one. "Philadelphia offers excellent academic medical centers, research universities, and a startup community, all within a few blocks of each other," Barbara noted. Position, for another: three of the four pointed to Philadelphia's ties to New York and Washington, the same "bridge" Azure described. And momentum. "Philadelphia is growing rapidly, with new manufacturing facilities and companies choosing to build here," said Jacky.
None of that will surprise anyone who has built a company in Philadelphia. But it lands differently coming from four people who could have started their venture careers anywhere, looked closely, and picked here.
The Year Ahead
Over the next 12 months, the fellows will be working inside our portfolio, writing memos on real deals, and sitting across the table from investors across the region and beyond. Next fall, they'll defend an investment thesis on aging and longevity.
If you're a founder in our portfolio, expect to hear from them! If you're an investor or expert in aging, longevity, medtech, or health tech and want to be part of the conversation, we'd love to connect. And if you want to see where their thinking goes, subscribe to Science Center Insights. We'll be sharing their work along the way.
