Dr. Cherkis is NewCap Partners’ Life Sciences expert and specializes in helping clients in that industry identify partner companies for M&A, strategic alliances, and corporate equity investments.

With over 20 years of experience in business management and consulting, her diverse global client base includes government agencies, startups, established companies, and Fortune 100 firms, and encompasses a wide variety of health/biotech areas, including drug discovery, bioinstrumentation, medical devices, diagnostics, agriculture, food preservation, and bioremediation.

Carol’s areas of business expertise include:  strategic alliance formation, business development, competitive intelligence and strategic planning, organizational development, technology assessment and licensing, project management, and product development. During the last few years, her efforts have focused on formation of alliances with companies in China and Japan.  

In addition to her role at NewCap Partners, she is the President of BioInfoStrategies, a consulting firm that she founded after a twenty-year multi-functional career with The Dow Chemical Company.   In that role, her advisory services focus on assisting small and medium-sized, fast growing companies in the biotechnology/pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics, biochemical reagents, biodetection/instrumentation, and bio-derived fuels and chemicals/biomaterials arenas with assessing the commercial feasibility of their technologies, developing and implementing business strategies, and establishing licensing, co-development, marketing, and distribution alliances.

During 1997-98, she served as the Director of Healthcare at Frost & Sullivan, then one of the largest market research firms in Silicon Valley, and implemented a successful turnaround for that division. 
      
Carol started her career in R&D with The Dow Chemical Company.  After several years as a scientist and research manager, she moved into the business functions and spent the remainder of her Dow career leading customer-focused product development efforts, establishing marketing and distribution alliances, and launching new products.

In her last position at Dow, she was the Biotechnology Program Director in the Corporate Ventures Group and had global responsibility for identifying small and medium-sized companies as sources of new technology as well as corporate partners to expedite market penetration of existing and future products.  At that time, she had the opportunity to work on a broad spectrum of Life Sciences projects that were part of critical business and technology strategies in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, specialty chemicals, food packaging, medical device, and environmental industries.

In 1996, Dow sold its pharmaceutical division, Marion Merrell Dow, to Hoechst and Carol founded BioInfoStrategies and moved to California.

Dr. Cherkis has a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the University of Michigan Medical School and an A.B. in Biology from Bryn Mawr College.