Navigation Sciences Leadership

Alan has served in senior business development and marketing positions at development stage and emerging medical technology companies for more than 25 years. He has global senior management experience enhancing investor value, including execution of successful fund raising through IPOs, private placements, and cross border M&A transactions. His experience includes work at Alira Health, EnlightenVue, Simplicity Orthopedics, ABIOMED, Implant Sciences, Kirschner Orthopedics and ACUFEX MicroSurgical.

Raphael Bueno, MD is the Chief of Thoracic Surgery, the Fredric G Levin Distinguished Chair in Thoracic Surgery and Lung Cancer Research, and Co-Director of the Lung Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is also a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He leads one of the largest comprehensive divisions of thoracic surgery in the US, which is responsible for nearly 5,000 cases per year. Dr. Bueno’s basic research is focused on developing molecular biomarkers in mesothelioma and lung cancer as well as using genomic strategies to expand therapies for these malignancies. His clinical research is focused on developing new strategies to target small lung nodules and GGOS as well as engineer innovative clinical trials using biological and immune therapies for thoracic cancer.

Dr. Jayender Jagadeesan is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Research Associate at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Member of the Broad Institute.  His research interests include image-guided therapy, surgical navigation, robotics, modeling and control of smart materials, and haptics. Minimally Invasive Surgical devices and applications form his primary research motivation. He is also the technical lead for several surgical procedures in the state-of-the-art Advanced Multimodality Image-guided Operating (AMIGO) suite at BWH.

Under Gabriele’s leadership, Alira Health, which was an early investor in Navigation Sciences, has grown from a boutique consultancy of fewer than 30 employees to a global enterprise with over 800 team members. He has raised more than $100 million in capital and serves on the board of MassMEDIC and other MedTech organizations.

Dr. Dagi is a renowned neurosurgeon, venture capitalist, professor at the Mayo College of Medicine and Science, and deputy chair of the surgical specialty board of neurosurgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Formerly, he was a director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Biomedical Entrepreneurship and Chair of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry, and Biomedical Sciences, and of the School of Management at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Dr. Dagi has served on Navigation’s Scientific Advisory Board since 2021. He brings deep expertise in surgical innovation, patient safety, and life sciences strategy.

Steve is an experienced biotech executive, venture investor, scientist, entrepreneur, and author. Throughout his career he has focused on building companies to translate scientific advances into solutions for patients and providers. He currently advises life science companies on strategy and financings. Previously, he was CEO of Gemphire Therapeutics, Inc., a public biotech which he joined after 10 years as a Managing Director at Excel Venture Management, a firm he co-founded, and which has invested $225M across more than 40 life science companies. At Excel, Steve served as a Board Director of more than a dozen private and public biotech, medtech, diagnostics, and health IT companies, with many successful exits. Prior to Excel, Steve held CEO and CSO positions at two life sciences companies. Steve is currently a Director at Orionis Biosciences and iSpecimen which recently went public on the Nasdaq [ISPC].
Steve began his career as a professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, where he published more than 130 scientific papers and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the American Heart Association (AHA). He was an advisor to the Innovation Groups at the Cleveland Clinic and Mass General Brigham. He received his Ph.D. from Duke University, post-doctoral training at Yale University, and his B.S. from Union College.

Cynthia is a serial entrepreneur and executive with an extensive background in finance, including partnering, fundraising, and investment.

In addition to her CEO roles at Healthquest, a global biotechnology and medical technologies advisory firm, and Tana Systems, a global software and IT company based in the U.S. and India, she serves on the board of directors of Certus Critical Care and Ethan Allen Interiors. Ms. Tsai spent 16 years on Wall Street as a Vice President with Merrill Lynch and Kidder Peabody. She is the former Founder and CEO of HealthExpo, the largest consumer healthcare event in the U.S., where she grew the enterprise from concept to execution, attracting more than 50 million consumers to HealthExpo.
Previously, Ms. Tsai was a General Partner in MassTech Ventures, a multi-million-dollar equity fund focused on technology development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She currently serves on the Board of Selectors for the Jefferson Foundation Awards and is on the board of the Prix Galien Foundation. In 1999, the Harvard Business School Alumni Chapter in New York recognized Ms. Tsai with an Early Stage Honor Roll Award for Entrepreneurship. In 2004, she also received a “Leading Woman Entrepreneur of the World” Award from the Star Foundation in Overland Park, Kansas. She earned a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Missouri.

Rick Williams is an expert on leadership, author, and experienced technology company board of directors’ member and board chair. Rick currently serves on the boards of Amorphex Therapeutics and Career Town. He has served on multiple other boards, including the national board of directors of the Private Directors Association (PDA), the professional association of directors of private companies, as well as two companies where he was board chair, Point Care Technology,  a medical device company, and Growth Capital Corp., a bank/venture capital firm.

Mr. Williams is an internationally published thought leader on the board of directors as a company value accelerator. His book, Create the Future, is a leadership guidebook for individuals to be more creative in making difficult decisions their company and themselves when getting it right is imperative. He is the host of the, Create the Future with Rick Williams Podcast, where leaders share their experiences making tough corporate decisions.

Mr. Williams is the past President of the Harvard Business School Association of Boston. Early in his career, Rick was a management consultant with the global consulting firm Arthur D. Little, Inc., advising companies in a wide variety of industries. Rick also founded and ran the award-winning real estate investment and development company, The Equity Company, Inc. He is a physics graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

David’s expertise lies in constructing a reliable financial framework to attract funding. He possesses over thirty years of senior financial management experience in various capacities for a variety of medical device, life sciences, and healthcare related companies, including GSI Lumonics, Glympse Bio, Infobionic, Confer Health, and Third Pole Therapeutics.  He is a contributor to the entrepreneurial ecosystem as an active presenter and panelist with, among others, TechStars, MassChallenge, and MIT Enterprise Forum.  David is an active member of the angel investor community and has a BS from Miami University (Ohio), and an MBA from the University of Cincinnati.  David is a licensed Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and is an adjunct instructor in the MBA program teaching Entrepreneurial Finance at Northeastern University.