Susan R. Windham-Bannister, Heller PhD’77
From Left to Right: Lisa Lynch, Susan R. Windham- Bannister, David Weil, President Ron Liebowitz
Susan Windham-Bannister is an internationally recognized expert in innovation, market access, and market optimization strategies. She is president and CEO of Biomedical Growth Strategies.
From 2008-15, Windham-Bannister was president and CEO of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, a state-funded investment organization charged with administering a $1 billion life sciences-focused innovation fund created by Gov. Deval Patrick, H’17. She is the first African American to lead a life sciences innovation fund of this scale. During her tenure, the MLSC invested more than $700 million from the fund, leveraged another $2.7 billion in matching investment capital, established Massachusetts as the global leader in life sciences, and made the life sciences the fastest job-producing sectors of the Massachusetts economy.
Earlier in her career, Windham-Bannister was managing partner at Abt Bio-Pharma Solutions.
Windham-Bannister has been recognized by The Boston Globe as one of the 10 Most Influential Women in Biotech and by Boston Magazine as one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Boston.
She is president of the Association for Women in Science.
She received a PhD in health policy from the Heller School, where she wrote a dissertation on “National Health Insurance as an Issue in Political Economy: The Implications of the Kennedy Health Security Act for Developing a Strategy to Effect Major Reorganization of Health Care Delivery in America.” She completed her doctoral work under a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Windham-Bannister also served as a postdoctoral fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and as a fellow in the Center for Science and Policy at Cambridge University.