Tania Fernandez

Director - India

Tania Fernandez is currently Director, India, at Burrill & Company and is actively involved with sourcing and evaluating United States-India cross-border and pure-play Indian life science investment opportunities in venture capital and merchant banking.

She holds a Board Observer seat at BioImagene, a cross-border company in the digital pathology space. She is also India Editor for the Burrill Report, a bimonthly publication that covers key developments in the life sciences. She also sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of Express Pharma, Mumbai, India. Dr. Fernandez has more than 14 years of research experience in the fields of oncology and molecular biology. She secured her doctorate at the Cancer Research Institute, India, having been awarded the Indo-U.S. scholarship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She won the Young Scientist Award and the most outstanding doctoral thesis award at Bombay University. She previously gained operations experience at Hoechst Pharmaceuticals, Mumbai, India. After completing her doctorate, Dr. Fernandez specialized in the fields of protein chemistry, protein delivery systems, and genetic engineering at the College of Medicine, Texas A&M University as a Research Associate. In 1999, she joined the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health as a post-doctoral associate and was appointed staff scientist in 2000. Her work at the NIH resulted in two awards for excellence in biomedical research. Her research has been published in top scientific journals and she has been an invited speaker at national and international conferences. She completed courses in biotech startups for Scientists and Technology Transfer while at the NIH. She is an active member of the National Institutes of Health BioScience Business Interest group, The NIH Stem Cell Group, the Women in Bio group, and the Women’s Technology Cluster (now Astia) where she assists with mentoring biotech companies and evaluating them.