Barbara Neves, Venture Fellow
"I'm passionate about driving better health outcomes, and in this space, we get to see early ideas start gaining real traction."
Science Center Venture Fellow, Barbara Neves
Barbara Neves: The Go-To-Market Translator
What first pulled you toward the venture side of health and life sciences?
Venture felt like the place where both halves of my background meet. Years of building data-driven marketing in the D2C space, combined with an M.S. in Precision Health, taught me how to help drive innovation when the bottleneck isn't the science but the path to market. I'm passionate about driving better health outcomes, and in this space, we get to see early ideas start gaining real traction. It's about understanding the business end to end and helping great ideas and science reach their users.
You're all coming to this program from outside of the Philadelphia region. What made the Science Center and Philadelphia's life sciences and healthcare ecosystem the right place to be right now?
Sitting between two very influential hubs (New York and D.C.), the Science Center is right at the center of it all. Philadelphia offers excellent academic medical centers, research universities, and a startup community, all within a few blocks of each other. This connection is real, and the city's leadership in cell and gene therapy shows what it can produce.
Being part of this ecosystem means having the opportunity to actively participate in projects driving health innovation that actually gets commercialized.
You're running several workstreams this year, from portfolio embeds to a co-authored thesis on aging and longevity. Which part are you most excited to dig into?
Definitely the capstone thesis on aging and longevity. I'm paying more attention to global socioeconomic and demographic trends, and I want to be part of those who are proactively driving long-term positive impact. What excites me most is learning from the interviews, connecting with the experts already in this space, and getting close to the real operators and investors.
Where do you see an opportunity in health or medtech that you don't think enough people are paying attention to?
People now generate huge amounts of their own health data, from wearables to at-home tests to direct-to-consumer labs, but very little of it shapes actual care decisions. I'm curious about how this, together with education, technology, and trust, can actually impact lives and empower people to take better care of their health. I believe that connecting the dots in healthcare innovation, especially in prevention and healthy aging, is still underestimated.
When you're sizing up an early-stage company, what's the first thing that gets you excited, and the first thing that gives you pause?
What excites me is the founder and the team. Someone who can clearly articulate their passion, explain who the user is, who the buyer is, and how it influences health outcomes. What gives me pause is a great product with a vague path to adoption. I check whether the growth story holds up, and whether customer acquisition assumptions are built for a real health system. Here is where my marketing background comes in and makes me instinctively look at whether there's real traction for it to work.
Complete the sentence, "A year from now, I hope to..."
Have sharpened my investor's eye without losing my operator's instinct. But more importantly, to have helped founders shorten the path to delivering the best they have to the market that needs it. To be on the side of those fighting the good fight while learning and growing as someone who loves healthcare and wants to deliver value at the intersection of healthcare, prevention, business, and entrepreneurship.