Meet the latest Harvard Business School Blavatnik Fellows: Matt Ross
With its spirited motto that “The science of today is the business of tomorrow,” the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School (HBS) recently named five new fellows.
Established in 2013 and supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the one-year program offers Harvard alumni and Harvard-affiliated postdoctoral researchers practical materials. The fellowship provides access to strategic resources to create new ventures around promising life science technologies while developing leadership talents.
Matt Ross, one of the fellows for 2022-2023, will work with Harvard inventors and Harvard-affiliated hospitals to promote the commercialization of life science technologies with significant market potential.
Bio: Before Harvard Business School, Ross worked for Sanofi Genzyme, Medumo (acquired by Philips) and Bridgewater Associates. He earned his bachelor’s from Dartmouth College in economics and an MBA from HBS in 2022.
The innovation: Ross is working to solve one of the biggest problems facing clinical trials: patient recruitment. He is CEO and co-founder of Trove Health, which aims to revolutionize the healthcare space and become the world’s largest database of consented and identified patients for clinical research. Patients can control, monetize, and receive personalized treatments and recommendations based on their personal health information.
Promising results: Working with HBS Professor Satish Tadikonda, who developed the company’s initial technology for patient identification and enrollment, Ross started Trove Health with the goal of helping patients through digital health platforms. During his fellowship, Ross will develop and expand Trove Health’s core software platform.
Looking ahead: Ross said he’s “incredibly grateful for the foundation’s invaluable support to help my team and me on our journey at Trove Health to make health data more accessible and expedite the development of transformative cures and treatments for patients worldwide.”
What others are saying: “Since joining the Blavatnik Fellowship five years ago, the community has doubled in size and fellows’ companies funding has quadrupled. It is gratifying to be a part of the program’s tremendous growth and mentor next generation entrepreneurs who contribute to society by commercializing groundbreaking technology and biomedical innovation,” said Peter Barrett, Ph.D., faculty chair and leader of the Blavatnik Fellowship.
Spurring investment: Since 2013, Blavatnik fellows have created 30 companies, developing, among other things, a precision gene therapy, a respiratory dialysis device, a femtech device using genomics to enable women’s care, a biosensing wearable to prevent dehydration, and an oxygen sensor for personalized oncology care. They have collectively raised more than $485 million in funding and an additional $244 million from an IPO in June 2020.
Read more about the latest Blavatnik fellows.