Biography
As the Associate Director for Entrepreneurship at Cornell Engineering, Kamana works with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship team to develop, implement and scale entrepreneurship initiatives for faculty and students. Kamana comes to this role with a successful background in academic research and translational clinical work. She has past experience of being the R&D director for an academic Regenerative Medicine startup where she led the company R&D portfolio growth and the complex regulatory strategy for development of a combination medical device (medical device and a biological product) involving different regulatory authorities and different FDA centers.
Additionally, having reviewed and assessed hundreds of funding applications in her past role with a Venture Capital Group as a Scientific Director to provide scientific merit recommendations to the management for funding, she comes to the table with a deep understanding of the innovation ecosystem from funders and funding agency perspectives. She has also built and grown her own boutique consultancy company providing non-dilutive fund-raising strategy and implementation services to multiple Pharma and Biotech startup companies.