Rebecca Mao PhD, MPH

Rebecca Mao is a ventures professional focused on life sciences and healthcare, with a background in venture strategy, operations, and technology commercialization. She joins the ventures team with experience spanning innovation programs, strategy consulting at Deloitte, and early stage venture development. Most recently, Rebecca worked at the National Institutes of Health, where she directed a high risk, high reward innovation portfolio, making investment recommendations through due diligence, milestone gating, and continuation decisions while balancing technical risk, market readiness, and downstream funding signals.

Previously, she worked in the private sector, where she co led a venture accelerator based in Silicon Valley focused on sourcing, evaluating, and advancing early stage digital health technologies from evaluation into venture formation and commercialization pathways. She brings a payer and market access perspective from her time at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, where she worked on initiatives examining how reimbursement incentives shape adoption, scaling, and commercial viability.

Across roles, Rebecca’s work centers on moving innovations from discovery into real world deployment and building the operational infrastructure that supports scale. She holds an MPH and a PhD focused on business strategy for pharmaceutical spinouts. Her work emphasizes backing technologies and teams with a clear path to adoption, capital efficiency, and durable value creation.