Catherine Stehman-Breen is a Venture Partner at F-Prime based in the Cambridge office, focusing on new company creation. She has more than 30 years of medical and biopharmaceutical experience. Prior to joining F-Prime, Catherine was CEO of Chroma Medicine, a company developing a novel epigenetic editing therapeutics platform where she built the company from inception. Previously, she was Chief Research and Development Officer at Obsidian Therapeutics, a cell therapy company developing engineered tumor infiltrating lymphocyte therapies for patients with solid tumors. As Entrepreneur in Residence at Atlas Venture, she worked closely with start-ups across a range of technologies and previously served as Chief Medical Officer at Sarepta Therapeutics. In addition, Catherine held various leadership roles at Regeneron and Amgen.
Catherine earned her M.D. from the University of Chicago. She completed her residency and nephrology fellowship training at the University of Washington, where she also received an M.S. in epidemiology. Catherine served as a faculty member in the division of nephrology and remains an affiliate associate professor in the University of Washington School of Public Health, with more than 90 publications in medical journals.
Clare Bernard is a Venture Partner at F-Prime. She is focused on new company creation at the intersection of tech and the life sciences. Prior to F-Prime she led data science and software efforts at the Broad Institute, managing the team that developed several widely used open-source bioinformatics tools and software platforms including the Terra platform and GATK. She also led product and engineering at Tamr, a Cambridge-based software company that uses machine learning to integrate large datasets.
She received her B.S. in math and physics from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. from Boston University for research in particle physics conducted at the Large Hadron Collider.
Bobby Gaspar is a Venture Partner with F-Prime based in London. Bobby is a world-renowned scientist and physician and accomplished strategic and organizational leader with more than 25 years of experience in medicine and biotechnology. He is one of the principal scientific founders and current chief executive officer of Orchard Therapeutics, a global gene therapy leader recently acquired by Kyowa Kirin with the goal of accelerating the delivery of new gene therapies to patients around the globe. Bobby has been a pioneer in gene therapy and the evolution of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) gene therapy technology—including some of the first studies in patients with severe primary immune deficiencies—bringing it from some of the first studies in patients into late-stage clinical trials. His unparalleled expertise and deep relationships with key physicians and treatment centers around the world are integral to Orchard’s efforts to identify patients with metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and other severe genetic conditions through targeted disease education, early diagnosis and comprehensive newborn screening.
Bobby was named to the inaugural TIME100 Health list in 2024, recognizing him as one of the world’s most influential individuals impacting human health. In addition to his role at Orchard, Bobby also serves as the chair of the board of directors at Eligo Biosciences, a privately-held biotech company expanding the scope of genetic medicines through gene-editing of the microbiome. He is also a venture partner at F-Prime, a global venture creation and investment firm with $4.5 billion under management.
Bobby is an honorary professor of pediatrics and immunology at the University College London (UCL) Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and has led multiple clinical trials that have shown that gene therapy can successfully correct the genetic defect in immune deficiencies. He studied medicine and surgery at Kings College in London before completing his Ph.D. at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.
Steve Johnson is a Venture Partner with F-Prime based in Cambridge. He specializes in technology start-ups, investing, mentoring, and managing ambitious technology companies. Steve is committed to purpose-driven organizations, prioritizing customers, disruptive technologies, and impactful contributions to industries and markets. Steve’s background includes leading strategy, M&A, B2B and B2C2B, enterprise software organizations, scaling hyper-growth enterprise companies globally, helping raise over $2B in funding, and participating in the creation of billions in market value for these companies.
Previously, Steve served as the President and COO at Berkshire Grey (BG) the leader in AI and robotics for the supply chain industry. He helped launch the commercial business for them, growing from a couple of customers to tens of customers around the world during his 4.2 year tenure. While there, BG raised a series B, went public in 2021 and was acquired by SoftBank in July 2023 and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. Before Berkshire Grey Steve was the Chief Commercial Officer of Intelex, a global enterprise software company. Intelex was acquired for $570M in June 2019 by Industrial Scientific.
Prior to joining Intelex, Steve served as President and COO for Vidyard, and CRO for Hootsuite, an enterprise software company now used by over 80% of the Fortune 100 companies. At Hootsuite he managed the growth of the company from 27 people to over 1,000 people around the world.
Earlier in his career, Steve worked for a number of category creating software companies such as CRM, Relational Database management, Total Interaction Management, and other areas. Steve holds an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg Business School with an emphasis in management, marketing, and international business and a B.S. in accounting from Union College.
Nicholas Haining, BM, BCh is a Venture Partner at F-Prime based in the Cambridge office. Nicholas is also the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Arsenal Biosciences, a cell therapy company based in South San Francisco.
During his time as an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, his lab defined some of the key transcriptional and epigenetic regulators of T cell exhaustion and used in vivo genetic screens to identify immune vulnerabilities of cancer cells in mouse models. Nicholas’ clinical expertise is in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and he worked on the bone marrow transplant team at Boston Children’s Hospital for nearly twenty years.
More recently, he served as Vice-President, Discovery Oncology and Immunology at Merck Research Laboratories, where he led a multi-site, multidisciplinary team developing innovative approaches to identify therapies for cancer and immune diseases.
Nicholas was elected into the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering.
As a physician-scientist, immunologist and drug developer, Nicholas received his undergraduate and medical degree from Oxford University, UK. He subsequently completed his medical training in Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Jessica Chen, M.D., is a Venture Partner at F-Prime and the Chief Health and Wellness officer of ThriveWell™, an umbrella company committed to promoting health, wellness, and longevity nationwide. Her mission to enhance people’s well span incorporates a holistic, community-based approach to care that moves beyond a typical clinical setting and focuses on purpose, healthy eating, exercise, spirituality, and preventive medicine. She also incorporates her personal experiences into her work. ThriveWell’s MRS Diet, for example, was inspired by Dr. Chen’s approach to feeding her own family. M, mostly plant-based. R, real whole foods. S, stop eating before you are full.
Dr. Chen perfected her holistic approach to care as the Chief Clinical Officer at ChenMed, a nationally recognized full-risk healthcare organization serving more than 200,000 patients across 15 states. At ChenMed, Dr. Chen helped implement a care model that reduced hospitalization by 30 to 50 percent and helped patients live, on average, five to seven years longer than their non-ChenMed counterparts. She then led the company’s clinical, recruitment, onboarding, training, and leadership programs; inspiring new generations of physicians to achieve the same results through a doctor/patient relationship built on trust and influence. Her efforts to achieve a culture of high-quality outcomes were instrumental in ChenMed being named to Fortune Magazine’s 2020 Change the World list, the only healthcare delivery organization so recognized.
Dr. Jessica Chen holds a doctorate degree from the University of Miami and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at UM/Jackson Memorial Hospital. She is actively involved in Nicaragua Medical Missions, a Christian non-profit organization that provides medical assistance to underserved communities in Nicaragua. She is married to her medical school sweetheart, Dr. Gordon Chen, ThriveWell’s Chief Executive Officer. Together, they have four children.
Gordon Chen, M.D., is a Venture Partner with F-Prime and the Chief Executive Officer of ThriveWell™, an umbrella company committed to promoting health, wellness, and longevity. The organization employs integrated, holistic offerings through two unique brands that provide concierge-style outcome-based medical care with access to an exclusive facility for motivated adults to maximize their healthspan (BLU By ThriveWell), and a proactive approach to home care that keeps members active, eating right, mentally engaged, and productive (ThriveWell At Home).
Dr. Chen discovered how adults benefit from outcome-based, longevity medicine within a community-based environment that focused on purpose, nutrition, movement, and spirituality when he and his family built out ChenMed, America’s leading primary care provider for older adults. As the organization’s Chief Medical Officer, he helped over 200,000 older adults across 15 states significantly improve their outcomes and gain 5-7 healthier years.
Dr. Chen is also an accomplished author, co-writing “The Calling: A Memoir of Family, Faith and the Future of Healthcare,” which outlines his family’s story and their vision for proactive, transformative care. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, as well as a preventative cardiology expert, Dr. Chen is deeply involved in charitable work, supporting medical missions in Nicaragua and at-risk youth through his family’s non-profit, Youth Impact Center. He is married to his medical school sweetheart, Dr. Jessica Chen, ThriveWell’s Chief Health and Wellness Officer and former Chief Clinical Officer of ChenMed. Together, they have four children.
As CMO of Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW), Allison sets the company’s marketing and revenue operations strategy worldwide. Since joining Flywire in 2019, Allison has led the growth of its marketing function, building out new teams in APAC and EMEA, and scaling up a new revenue operations function. Allison was also instrumental in leading Flywire to its successful IPO in May, 2021.
She has more than 15 years of marketing experience, including seven years at Rapid7 (Nasdaq: RPD). There, she focused on building and optimizing the company’s growth by building and scaling demand generation, business development, and operations. Previously, she worked at Forrester in several digital and field-based roles.
Allison is on the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and serves as strategic advisor to early-stage companies. Allison holds a Master of Arts in Integrated Marketing from Emerson College, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Julia McDowell is a Venture Partner at F-Prime focusing on healthcare strategy, operations, and business development. She has committed her career to improving healthcare quality, access, cost, and experience. Most recently, Julia led the complex care delivery business at Galileo, Inc, a risk-bearing provider, serving Medicare and Medicaid patients at home, in the community, and virtually. Previously, Julia was Sr. Director of HealthHUBs at CVS Health, leading commercialization strategy, new product opportunities, and consumer experience for care delivery in CVS stores. Early in her career, Julia delivered public health programs all over the world, including starting and leading the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s first family planning program.
Julia is a former Fulbright Fellow and holds an MBA from Yale University as a Frederick Frank Fellow, an MPH from Emory University as a Woodruff Fellow, and a BA with honors from Brown University. She serves on multiple non-profit boards including Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, Inc. and Social Enterprise Greenhouse.
Stephanie is a Venture Partner at F-Prime, advising portfolio companies in the USA, Europe, and India on their GTM strategies for sales, marketing, and customer success. She is also currently a Value Accelerator Operating Advisor at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and previously held roles at Salesforce, Cordial Inc., Iterable, and Optimizely. Prior to her current roles, she was CMO at Gainsight where she successfully re-structured the Marketing and Business Development organizations ahead of the company’s $1.1bn exit in 2020, gaining valuable M&A experience along the way.
Stephanie brings more than 30 years of experience building and advising impactful and customer-centric sales and marketing teams at high-growth SaaS companies. She understands growth stage, scale-up, and established public company structure and culture, with knowledge of scaling companies from $3M ARR to more than $300M.
Stephanie is a graduate of the University of Northumberland, where she received a degree in Marketing (Hons).