The Managing Fellows are a group of students from different schools and departments at UC Berkeley and UCSF. They manage VIP and facilitate interactions between teams and mentors.

Raphael Michel - Founder and Executive Director of VIP
Raphael is an MBA candidate at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, class of 2008. During the summer of 2007, Raphael interned at De Novo Ventures, a venture capital firm dedicated to the medical device and biotechnology sectors. During his first year at Haas, Raphael founded the Venture Innovation Program (VIP) in Life Sciences. Also during his first year, he won the Berkeley Business Plan Competition and placed in the Technology Breakthroughs Competition. Before attending Haas, Raphael spent three years working in an early-stage medical device company, Minnow Medical. As the first hire, he helped the founder build the company from the ground up, leading the development of a breakthrough cardiovascular catheter-based system and helping to secure several rounds of private funding. Raphael holds a M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and participated in the Stanford Biodesign Innovation Program; his project was awarded a grant by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
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Adam Mendelsohn
Adam is a PhD candidate at the UC San Francisco/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, class of 2010. In his first summer pursuing his PhD in 2006, Adam was awarded an NSF fellowship to research in Japan with Kyoto University’s Department of Drug Delivery Research. Upon returning from Japan, Adam joined the Therapeutic Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at UCSF headed by Professor Tejal A. Desai, where he is currently researching new treatment options for Type I diabetes through the immunoisolated transplantation of insulin-producing cells. Also during his second year in the PhD program, Adam joined Venture Innovation Program (VIP) in Life Sciences as a fellow. Prior to graduate school, Adam spent two years with Advanced Bionics, a Boston Scientific Company, where he successfully developed a piezoresistive pressure sensor and an overfill safety valve that became part of an implantable drug delivery pump. Adam holds a B.S. in Physics and a B.A. in Music – Piano Performance from UCLA, where he also co-founded a co-ed professional business fraternity, Alpha Kappa Psi.
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Corey Adams
Corey is a PhD candidate in Pharmacogenomics and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). From 2004-2007 Corey served as Executive Director of the UCSF Innovation Accelerator (IA), a lab-to-market bioentrepreneurship group that helps UCSF life science inventors commercialize their research discoveries. Since the group was founded in 2001, IA entrepreneurs have raised nearly $100 million in venture capital and SBIR/STTR funding. Prior to joining UCSF, Corey worked for four years at Boston University Medical Center (BUMC). At BUMC, Corey implemented $1 million seed money to create a sequencing, genotyping, and DNA extraction core facility that served over 120 laboratories on multiple research and medical campuses. Corey currently co-chairs BayBioNEST, the entrepreneurial arm of BayBio, northern California's largest biotech trade industry organization.
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Dan Brounstein
Dan is the West Coast Program Manager for Orthofix Spine. At Orthofix, Dan has begun building a West Coast incubator, focused on innovation in the spinal implant market. He graduated from UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business with a certificate in Entrepreneurship. While at Berkeley, he founded the University of California Biofellowship, a summer internship focused on putting researchers and business school students in medical device startups, co-founded the Bioentrepreneurship Roundtable, and won the Berkeley Business Plan competition. He spent 8 years in the medical device business in a product development role before Haas with companies such as Progressive Angioplasty Systems, Heartport, and Rubicor Medical. He has five issued patents in the cardiovascular and breast oncology spaces.
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Jason Park
Jason is a dual-degree MD/PhD candidate in the NIH-sponsored Medical Scientist Training Program - pursuing his M.D. at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine and his Ph.D. in the UCSF / UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering. He believes strongly in the importance of bringing people together in science, business, and medicine to develop biomedical innovations that can make a positive impact on human health. Jason holds an M.Eng. in Biomedical Engineering from MIT, where he did his thesis research in the field of gene synthesis technology. He is second author on a publication on protein-mediated error correction for gene synthesis, with other manuscripts in the process of being written and submitted. His current research interests are varied. Jason also holds a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering / Biology from MIT.
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Josh Bleharski
Joshua is a 2nd year MBA candidate at the Haas School of Business focused on an investment banking career within the healthcare industry. He is an active member of the Haas Finance Club and Berkeley BioBusiness Association, and was awarded an Investment Banking Fellowship from Haas in the fall of 2007. During the summer of 2007, Joshua interned with JPMorgan’s biotechnology and medical devices investment banking group in San Francisco, where he worked on a dual-track M&A/IPO process for a leading medical aesthetics company. Prior to Haas, Joshua was a Senior Staff Scientist in an early-stage biotechnology company working to develop novel vaccine platforms. In this role he was responsible for directing the company’s pre-clinical Avian Flu vaccine studies, while also working closely with senior management on formulating project timetables, budgets, and execution strategies. Joshua holds a Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Genetics from UCLA and a B.S. in Biology from Duke University.
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Patrick Goodwill
Patrick Goodwill is a 4th year PhD student in the UCSF/UCB Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering. At UCB, he is developing a new imaging modality, Magnetic Particle Imaging, which looks to be 100x more sensitive than MRI at detecting and localizing magnetic particles. In 2007, he won the Berkeley Business Plan Competition and placed in the Technology Breakthroughs Competition. He is funded by a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine fellowship and a UC Berkeley graduate fellowship. Patrick hold a B.S. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and also designed and debugged microprocessors at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara for 3.5 years.
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Sebastien Payen
Sebastien Payen is currently a PhD candidate (graduating in December 2007) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of California at Berkeley. His PhD project is the design of a biosensor to detect changes in glucose (and pH) in grapes for the wine industry. In addition to his PhD, Mr. Payen is a Mayfield Fellow 2006. This fellowship is awarded to students with interests for entrepreneurship in high-technology. Prior to coming at UC Berkeley, Mr. Payen served during one year in the French Navy as a deck officer on a mine-hunter. He also worked as a scientist and process engineer in a small biotechnology start-up in the Bay Area between June 2003 and May 2004. Mr. Payen received his Master of Sciences from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley in May 2003. In July 2001, prior to coming at UC Berkeley, Mr. Payen graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, one of the top engineering schools in France. While finishing his PhD, Mr. Payen is founding a company which aims at introducing new technology in the vineyard for the wine industry.
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Tina Cheng
After receiving a B.S. in Biochemical Engineering from UCLA and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from UC Davis, Tina worked at Guidant Corporation for 5 years as a stent designer and project lead for its second generation drug-eluting stent projects. Tina then joined AngioScore, an interventional cardiology medical device company as R&D manager, managing both cardiovascular and peripheral projects. After AngioScore, Tina attended the MBA program of Haas Business School at UC Berkeley. While attending Haas Business School, Tina helped to start up and build a successful medical device company, TriReme Medical Inc, as the first employee and the person in charge of R&D and product development. After receiving her MBA, Tina joined the healthcare team at Scale Venture Partners as a summer associate, where she screened a broad universe of about 1,100 start-ups, identified a number of potential investment opportunities, and conducted due diligence on selected companies. Currently, Tina is working at VasoNova, a medical device company focusing in catheter placement technology, as the head of product development, defining milestones for the company and assisting the founders in the next round of fund-raising. Tina also has 2 publications and holds 11 US patents in cardiovascular devices.
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