Healthcare & Entrepreneurship - A chat with Dr. Chandra Kavanagh
Dr. Chandra Kavanagh, Director at Bounce Health Innovation.
I (Reem) had the opportunity to interview Dr. Chandra Kavangh this past September to learn more about her role with Bounce Health Innovation and her career journey. Having attended some Bounce events in the past (which I highly recommend), I was interested to hear how Dr. Kavanagh grew this company aimed at flourishing the healthcare innovation talent here in Newfoundland and Labrador! Read below to learn more about our conversation:
Reem (R): What is your job and what does it entail?
Dr. Chandra Kavanagh (C): I am the Director of an organization called Bounce Health Innovation. Bounce is an incubator, accelerator resource center for entrepreneurs in medtech and biotech. My job as the director of the organization is essentially everything you could imagine; from onboarding new companies and health innovators who have an interesting idea in medical technology that they’d like to commercialize, to creating new programs like our internship program or embryo grant program. [Currently], we are in the process of engaging in a piloting project taking 6 interns and 6 bounce partner companies to the UK in order to explore the market, look for new opportunities, and new partners. [My role] involves connecting with the senior trade commissioners in the UK to setting up meetings, and booking people’s flights – it really is an all encompassing position!
(R): When did you start becoming interested in the field of healthcare tech and entrepreneurship?
(C): Healthcare itself has been a passionate interest of mine. My background is in biomedical ethics, so I come from a non-technical background. I did my graduate degrees in philosophy departments - my undergraduate, masters, and PhD. I was very interested in the problems associated with healthcare. There were so many ethical issues, it's a really rich space when it comes to asking those kinds of questions. We all have experiences with healthcare and the conundrums and difficult decisions that come with healthcare. So that was an interest of mine from the beginning. Then when I was in my mid-twenties I started my own entrepreneurial venture, [which] was something outside of the healthcare space. That was a business that helped organizations develop mentorship programs. So I had this background in healthcare [and] I had this background in entrepreneurship, and then when I was finishing my master’s just starting my PhD, I started doing work in digital data management. So, privacy ethics as it pertained to the collection, dissemination [and] storage of data became really interesting to me, and that was how I developed the technical side. I worked for the research and high computing center at McMaster University, and did a bunch of work for them more on the policy development side of [dealing with] all these technical things. So I had a healthcare, tech, and entrepreneurship background, and the position [with Bounce Health] was a confluence of all of those things.
(R): What has been your most influential success factor?
(C): That’s a very interesting question. I think there’s so many factors that go into someone’s career success. One thing that springs to mind for me has been the mentors who I’ve worked with. I find mentorship to be really important, especially as a relatively young woman and [being] early on in my career. Philosophy is actually one of the most male-dominated disciplines. So I came up in my academic career surrounded by men. Technology and entrepreneurship can [also] be very male dominated. One of the things that I noticed working in those spaces is that men have these great informal networks of mentoring. You can have an older man who will take a younger man under his wing, help support them, and take an interest in their career. Because women haven’t been in these spaces as long as men have, often we don’t have these informal networks of support. So, I took note of that, and very seriously took finding female mentors and asking them very formally “Would you please be my mentor”. [My mentor for a while was] Farah McCrate, the Director of Research and Innovation at Eastern Health. We met regularly once a month; I would take her out to coffee, we would talk about my career and she would give me some advice [which] I found tremendously valuable. Recently, [my new mentor] is Pamela Fralick, the CEO of Innovative Medicines Canada. Again, she was somebody I directly asked “Would you be my mentor?”, “Would you meet with me every month?”, and I found that level of support has been incredible for helping move my career forward, having someone to bounce ideas off of, or someone to discuss problems with. It can feel a little awkward sometimes asking someone if they’ll be your mentor, but I highly recommend it. If you just hope that those conversations will informally be created, sometimes that doesn't happen.
Key Takeaway: Find a mentor and approach them for mentorship directly
(R): What was the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career thus far?
(C): I have faced lots of challenges in my career [such as] being a young woman in a male-dominated field. I once had a philosophy professor from my PhD program try to order a drink for me when we were out at a faculty event. He didn’t realize that I was a PhD student, he thought that I was a waitress! So there are lots of little examples of things like that which have been challenging. There’s two [other] big challenges that come to mind. One is definitely imposter syndrome, so not being sure of yourself. That’s something that I feel still affects me in some ways, but I’ve been lucky enough, especially with my female mentors, to move beyond that. I feel pretty secure in where I am in my career now and happy to move beyond that. [I get] frustrated when I see other women struggling with that imposter syndrome and I want to do what I can to help them move beyond that. Another thing that I have experienced in the past is unsupportive supervisors. That’s something that can be hugely damaging to your career. So I’ve had amazing, wonderful, supportive supervisors/bosses, and that’s the thing that can skyrocket your career right away. Those are the people who give you opportunities, those are the people who give you support and meaningful constructive criticism. But if you have a supervisor/boss who’s not supportive, that can torpedo your career, especially if they are not trusting you with projects, undermining you, criticizing you to other people. It’s one of the things that I’d warn anyone against in their career. If you’re in a position where your supervisor or boss who’s not supportive of you, and you've tried to communicate openly and thats something that hasn’t worked, get out of there. Because that’s the kind of thing that can really damage your career, especially early on.
Dr. Chandra Kavanagh (bottom left) and members from Bounce Partner companies at the Atlantic Canada conference
(R): You’ve worked with a lot of people interested in healthcare tech, do you see yourself venturing into healthcare entrepreneurship?
(C): That's a great question, I get asked that a lot. There are a lot of bounce company partners out there that I think are winners, like companies that I think could make a billion dollars. I think someday, if the right opportunity came along, I would definitely consider it. Not today, I still have a lot of work to secure Bounce’s future and make sure that there’s an organization that is sustainable and can continue to grow. Once that journey is done, once Bounce needs someone to “drive the train” instead of “lay the tracks”, that's when I would consider another opportunity to help build the tracks for a medtech startup.
(R): What advice would you give to someone wanting to pursue healthcare startup, but unsure of where to start?
(C): Talk to Bounce! There’s two things we do really well at Bounce Health. We help entrepreneurs who already have an idea grow that idea into a money-making endeavour. We also help people who have an interest in healthcare or a set of technical skills and help them ideate. One of the things we really love to do is introduce people to healthcare problems. People who are already working in the healthcare system might’ve thought about this alot, but you might have a totally different view on how these problems could be solved. I think sometimes people think “I need to have a billion dollar idea” in order to get involved in entrepreneurship, but that’s not at all the case. Sometimes all you need is your set of skills and a bunch of problems. That’s how you can come up with a really great idea.
“Here I am, I’m ready to be a leader, I want to take this opportunity”
(R): What advice would you give to other young women hoping to pursue a path similar to yours?
(C): I hope that you don’t want to pursue a path similar to mine! I hope that you wanna pursue your own path. I was listening to Meghan Markle's podcast “Archetypes”, [which introduces] the idea that there are all these archetypes that define how society views women, which can be very limiting. The very first episode, the archetype [Meghan] talks about is “Ambition”. Sometimes we’ll hear about ambitious women and view it as a negative thing. Meghan Markle interviews Venus Williams, who has experience being labeled with this archetype. Venus Williams is remembering this interview she had when she was 11 when she was asked “What kind of tennis player do you wanna be like when you grow up?”. And [Venus] replies with “I want to be like me when I grow up”. So I hope that that’s the experience of young women in tech, is that they want to be like [themselves].
One of the things that I can definitely recommend if you are interested in pursuing a career in leadership, is to have a mentor and chase down those leadership opportunities. I’ve often heard from men giving this advice is “Take all the leadership opportunities that come to you”, which assumes that you will be offered a bunch of leadership opportunities of your choosing. In the case of young women, you have to pursue those and say “Here I am, I’m ready to be a leader, I want to take this opportunity”. So if what you want is to lead an organization, start now and chase after those opportunities!
This interview and blog was conducted and prepared by Reem Abdelrahim, WISE GSS Vice President (2022/2023)
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