Karen’s +30-year career path has been centered around her passion of contributing to the advancement of new medical technologies, to improve patient health outcomes. 

Early in her career, she learned about the basics of drug development while working in a start-up lab environment, focused on the development of diagnostic and therapeutic cancer applications of monoclonal antibodies, then in its infancy and now a mainstay in therapy.

Soon after Karen entered the hospital clinical environment, working within multi-disciplinary medical teams, focused on delivering the optimal drug therapies, for individual patients, in clinical rheumatology.

With this grounding, she moved into the pharmaceutical world (with Ciba now Novartis), which afforded her a myriad of opportunities to understand the commercialization process from lab bench to patient bedside for products such as Voltaren®, Foradil®, Femara® and Estraderm®. Karen progressively advanced through the regulatory environment, technical operations,  product management, and health economics, while participating in a selective executive  management program.  During her ten year career, she developed expertise and relationships with scientists, an extensive variety of health care professionals, and, managers and directors of both public and private reimbursement plans.  Her experience included organizational management roles in both domestic and international markets.

By 2000, Karen transitioned to the financial industry, as a Life Science equity analyst, focused on helping public Life Science companies advance their medical technologies to commercialization or acquisition, such as QLT (Visudyne®) , Angiotech (Taxus®) , ID Biomedical (acquisition by GSK $1.7Bn) , AnorMed (acquisition by Genzyme $580M), through support of the equity markets (+$50m raised). 

As an independent consultant since 2010, Karen has assumed executive roles in Life Science companies focused on Corporate and Business Development, participated as a director on the boards of public and private companies, and is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at e@UBC/Accelerator, mentoring start-up venture opportunities from within the Life Sciences Venture Portfolio, including Incisive Genetics. 

Karen, is a graduate of the University of Alberta, with degrees in Biochemistry, Pharmacy and an MBA.