Meet Our Team

Sujay Jadhav, MBA

Chief Executive Officer

Sujay Jadhav is the Chief Executive Officer at Verana Health where he is helping to accelerate the company’s growth and sustainability by advancing clinical trial capabilities, data-as-a-service offerings, medical society partnerships, and data enrichment.

Sujay joins Verana Health with more than 20 years of experience as a seasoned executive, entrepreneur, and global business leader. Most recently, Sujay was the Global Vice President, Health Sciences Business Unit at Oracle, where he ran the organization’s entire product and engineering teams. Before Oracle, Sujay was the CEO of cloud-based clinical research platform goBalto, where he oversaw the acquisition of the company by Oracle. Sujay is also a former executive for the life sciences technology company Model N, where he helped to oversee its transition to a public company.

Sujay holds an MBA from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering from the University of South Australia.

Marc Berger, Esq, MBA

Chief Operations Officer

Marc Berger is Chief Operations Officer at Verana Health. He was previously Senior Vice President at Verana Health and a member of the core leadership team responsible for setting Verana Health’s corporate strategy. He served as the company’s General Counsel and Privacy Officer and was responsible for the company’s legal functions, including corporate, privacy, commercial contracting, health law, and intellectual property activities. As Senior Vice President, he also oversaw Verana Health’s Security & Compliance and People & Culture teams.

Prior to joining Verana Health, Marc was General Counsel at Flatiron Health, where he was a member of the four-person team that negotiated the $2.1B acquisition by Roche. Marc has also served as Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Medidata Solutions, where he had global responsibility for negotiating agreements with life science companies and partners for Medidata’s clinical trial technology and service offerings.

Marc received his JD and MBA from the University of Miami School of Law, and his BS in Management and International Business from Penn State University.

Andrea Sim

Chief Product Officer

Andrea Sim is the Chief Product Officer at Verana Health where she oversees product management, program management, clinical informatics, and data normalization.

Andrea has more than two decades of product management and healthcare technology experience. Prior to joining Verana Health, Andrea was the Vice President of Product for the Health Sciences Business Unit at Oracle. Andrea came to Oracle through the acquisition of goBalto, Inc., where she also was the Vice President of Product. Before that, Andrea was with RelayHealth for nearly a decade, where she most recently served as Vice President of Product Management. She was part of the product management team for more than six years, holding responsibility for product strategy, research, and strategic initiatives for Health Information Exchange (HIE) and clinical integration. Before that, Andrea served in various product management and consulting roles for Oracle, WebMD, and First Consulting Group.

Andrea holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Molecular Cell Biology from University of California Berkeley.

Lawrence Whittle

Chief Commercial Officer

Lawrence Whittle is Chief Commercial Officer based in California. Lawrence is responsible for driving the market positioning and customer success at Verana Health. His remit spans a multitude of stakeholders, leading medical society engagement, healthcare provider experience, and life sciences partnerships, as well as the marketing and quantitative sciences functions to elevate awareness and value across the care continuum.

Lawrence has 25+ years experience as a senior executive within technologies companies spanning different industries, including Data Analytics and Life Sciences. His deep expertise in commercialization has covered elevating company positioning, driving sustainable customer value through deep in-market partnerships, and nurturing strong collaborations across all key functions of the business. His experience in early- and mid-stage companies has resulted in two IPOs and two M&A transactions.

Lawrence was born in London and is a true global citizen, having worked across many countries. He has been based in California since 2008 where he lives with his wife and three children.

Chris Reiling

Chief Revenue Officer

Chris Reiling is the Chief Revenue Officer for Verana Health. Chris leads the sales team and is responsible for the company’s revenue generation strategy and execution as well as its go-to-market approach.

Chris is a sales and account management executive with more than 15 years of experience scaling revenue and growth by optimizing sales processes, business development, strategic alliances, market positioning, and commercialization—primarily focused on healthcare data and technology. Prior to joining Verana Health, Chris held varying sales leadership roles at IQVIA across its life sciences and MedTech business, with his most recent responsibilities leading the U.S. Real World Data & Technology sales team.

Chris holds a BA in Economics from The University of Connecticut.

Kirk Fjeldheim

Chief Information Security Officer

Kirk Fjeldheim is Chief Information Security Officer, where he is responsible for Verana Health’s data, infrastructure and corporate protection strategies, which include identifying, developing, implementing, and maintaining processes across product and corporate systems. Kirk also manages corporate IT and Compliance. Kirk Fjeldheim brings several decades of experience at high-growth technology companies to Verana Health. Prior to joining Verana Health, Kirk was Chief Information Security Officer at Syapse, Inc. and Chief Information Officer at SugarCRM. As Vice President of IT and Security at Rally Health, he led Security, compliance and IT for more than 1,400 employees and developed and implemented HIPAA compliance and risk management efforts for a customer application reaching 38 million users. He has also held senior IT positions at Zynga, Xsigo Systems, Openwave Systems, and Siebel Systems.

Chidambaram Arunachalam

Senior Vice President of Engineering

Chidambaram “Chidhi” Arunachalam is Senior Vice President of Engineering, where he is responsible for leading the ingestion, curation, and applications teams at Verana Health.

Chidhi has more than 20 years of experience in engineering management, which includes leading product development across life sciences, healthcare, product lifecycle management and computer-aided design domains. Prior to joining Verana Health, Chidhi was the Global Vice President of Product Development for the Health Sciences Business Unit at Oracle, where he was responsible for various functions of software development and deployment. The products he helped to develop include a complete set of clinical and safety solutions that supported critical processes throughout the clinical development lifecycle – from study design and startup to conduct, close-out, and post-marketing.

Aracelis Torres, PhD, MPH

Senior Vice President, Customer Solutions and Quantitative Sciences

Aracelis Torres, PhD, MPH is Senior Vice President of Customer Solutions and Quantitative Sciences, where she oversees the quantitative sciences team working to develop and implement rigorous methodology to generate sound scientific evidence from real-world data. Dr. Torres is an epidemiologist with over ten years of academic and industry experience. Prior to joining Verana Health, she was a Director of Quantitative Sciences at Flatiron Health, where her work focused on translation of real-world oncology data to generate evidence. While at Flatiron Health, she led efforts related to the development of real-world endpoints, novel study designs, and prospective evidence generation while also serving as the Quantitative Sciences lead for the organization’s broader research collaboration with the FDA. She is also currently an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she teaches a course on large-scale data processing and analysis. 

Dr. Torres received a PhD in Cancer Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale University’s School of Public Health, and a BS in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Yale University.

Ann Watson

Senior Vice President,
People & Culture

Ann Watson is Verana Health’s Senior Vice President of People and Culture, bringing a passion for building teams to Verana Health’s next phase of growth. The People & Culture team is responsible for all phases of the employee lifecycle: from finding great people to supporting their development all the way through to the alumni phase. Ann has over twenty years of experience in Human Resources and Talent Acquisition, primarily with small and mid-sized technology organizations. Ann was previously the Chief People Officer at MasterClass, at Varo Bank, and ran the Employee Experiences organization at Fandom. She specializes in growing teams from 50 to 500+, doubling the team multiple years in a row, building infrastructure to scale through the early start-up stage to mid-size maturity and beyond.

Ann has a BA from Santa Clara University and is a member of PeopleTechPartners, an organization devoted to accelerating solutions that drive the future of work.

Ray Goforth

Senior Vice President of Marketing

Ray has more than 15 years of digital marketing experience and has led marketing strategies for lean startups, as well as global enterprise organizations. She excels in creating meaningful experiences for targeted audiences that drive engagement, return on investment, and customer loyalty. She’s led various digital engagements, including developing and overseeing large multifaceted growth strategies, global product launches, and go-to-market programs. She also has helped facilitate multiple successful acquisitions. Ray has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Oklahoma.

Dominique Connolly, RN, NP

Vice President of Clinical Data Strategy

Dominique Connolly, RN, BSN, MA, serves on the Medical team as the Vice President of Clinical Data Strategy at Verana Health. Connolly is a Nurse Practitioner with more than 20 years of experience in healthcare and oncology, with a recent focus in optimizing approaches for data curation, as well as building and scaling teams. Prior to joining Verana Health, Connolly served at Flatiron Health as Senior Clinical Director for the Research Platforms team, as well as Director of Clinical Data Abstraction, where she built and oversaw the unstructured data processing efforts. She earned a Bachelor of Nursing degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Nursing degree from New York University.

Yana Nikitina

Vice President of Engineering

Yana Nikitina is Vice President of Engineering, where she leads technology strategy and product development.

Yana brings over two decades of experience of building scalable, compliant, resilient, interoperable products. In the past years, she focused on accelerating growth in the Fintech space (LendingClub, Varo Bank and Braintree/PayPal). Yana held leadership roles in Data Platform, Actionable Insights, Mobile bank app, Payment Processing and Commerce Payment Platform.

Yana holds a BS in Computer Science from UC Davis.

Michelle McGovern, Esq, MS

General Counsel

Michelle McGovern is the General Counsel at Verana Health, where she works to find solutions that help set the market standard for data privacy in an increasingly complex legal environment.  Michelle was previously the Deputy General Counsel at Redesign Health, a venture-backed incubator that, during her tenure, raised $350M, and built, launched and scaled more than two dozen healthcare companies. Michelle also worked at Pfizer, where her roles included supporting clinical trials and pharmacovigilance, building sustainable markets for pharmaceutical products in the developing world, and serving as the North America Legal Lead for Upjohn, Pfizer’s $12B legacy products and generics business.

Michelle completed Northwestern University’s accelerated journalism degree program, graduating in four years, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor’s of Science and Master’s of Science in Journalism, and received her JD, cum laude, from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. Michelle has been credentialed by the International Association of Privacy Professionals as a Certified Information Privacy Manager. Michelle is also the President of the Board of Directors of 826NYC, a charity that helps under-resourced youth write their own paths forward, regardless of circumstance.

Almer Mendoza, MBA

Vice President Controller

Almer Mendoza, Vice President Controller, brings more than 20 years of experience in corporate finance, accounting, and auditing. Prior to joining Verana Health, Almer was VP Corporate Controller at Navis LLC – a leading provider of global cargo handling software, where he managed the worldwide accounting in more than 20 countries. Prior to Navis, he was VP Finance or Corporate Controller in several public and private technology companies, where he built accounting teams, completed first audits, helped prepare for initial public filings, implemented ERPs, and integrated acquired companies. He started his career as an auditor at Ernst and Young LLP.

Almer received his MBA from Pepperdine University, and his BS in Accounting from Northwestern State University. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant.

Michael Mbagwu, MD

Senior Medical Director

Michael Mbagwu, MD, Senior Medical Director, serves on the Medical Team as the Lead IRIS Registry Oversight Physician at Verana Health. He attended The Ohio State University where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Science and graduated Summa Cum Laude. He subsequently attended Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he received a Doctor of Medicine and graduated Cum Laude in Scientia Experimentalis. He also completed a Transitional/Medical internship year at Presence Resurrection Medical Center before returning to Northwestern to complete his residency training in Ophthalmology, where he served as Chief Resident. Dr. Mbagwu went on to complete an Ophthalmic Innovation Fellowship at the Byers Eye Institute/Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Mbagwu currently holds the academic rank of Adjunct Clinical Instructor of Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and is an attending physician with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto Health Care System.

David W. Parke II, MD
(Executive Chairman)

Former Chief Executive Officer

David W. Parke II, M.D.
Dr. Parke served from 2009 to 2022 as the Chief Executive Officer of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. He is now Executive Chairman of Verana Health, Inc. and remains CEO Advisor at the Academy.
After undergraduate education at Stanford University and medical school of Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Parke completed residency training and chief residency at Baylor’s Cullen Eye Institute followed by fellowships in diseases and surgery of the retina and vitreous.
He served for 17 years as president and chief executive officer of the Dean McGee Eye Institute and Professor and Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Oklahoma. After serving as president of the American Academy of Ophthalmology in 2008, Dr. Parke was chosen to become its full-time CEO.
He has served on the boards of companies in the insurance and digital health space. He is Past-President of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies.
Dr. Parke has been president of the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology and director of the American Board of Ophthalmology. In 2009 he was elected to Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis.
His most recent professional and scholarly activities have centered on health policy and economics, on biomedical organizational leadership and development, and on big data analytics.