Blog

Location: Cambridge

Jessica Chen, MD

Jessica Chen, MD, is a Venture Partner at F-Prime and the Chief Health and Wellness officer of ThriveWell™, an umbrella company committed to promoting health, wellness, and longevity nationwide. Her mission to enhance people’s well span incorporates a holistic, community-based approach to care that moves beyond a typical clinical setting and focuses on purpose, healthy eating, exercise, spirituality, and preventive medicine. She also incorporates her personal experiences into her work. ThriveWell’s MRS Diet, for example, was inspired by Dr. Chen’s approach to feeding her own family. M, mostly plant-based. R, real whole foods. S, stop eating before you are full.

Dr. Chen perfected her holistic approach to care as the Chief Clinical Officer at ChenMed, a nationally recognized full-risk healthcare organization serving more than 200,000 patients across 15 states. At ChenMed, Dr. Chen helped implement a care model that reduced hospitalization by 30 to 50 percent and helped patients live, on average, five to seven years longer than their non-ChenMed counterparts. She then led the company’s clinical, recruitment, onboarding, training, and leadership programs; inspiring new generations of physicians to achieve the same results through a doctor/patient relationship built on trust and influence. Her efforts to achieve a culture of high-quality outcomes were instrumental in ChenMed being named to Fortune Magazine’s 2020 Change the World list, the only healthcare delivery organization so recognized.

Dr. Jessica Chen holds a doctorate degree from the University of Miami and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at UM/Jackson Memorial Hospital. She is actively involved in Nicaragua Medical Missions, a Christian non-profit organization that provides medical assistance to underserved communities in Nicaragua. She is married to her medical school sweetheart, Dr. Gordon Chen, ThriveWell’s Chief Executive Officer. Together, they have four children.

Gordon Chen, MD

Gordon Chen, MD, is a Venture Partner with F-Prime and the Chief Executive Officer of ThriveWell™, an umbrella company committed to promoting health, wellness, and longevity. The organization employs integrated, holistic offerings through two unique brands that provide concierge-style outcome-based medical care with access to an exclusive facility for motivated adults to maximize their healthspan (BLU By ThriveWell), and a proactive approach to home care that keeps members active, eating right, mentally engaged, and productive (ThriveWell At Home).

Dr. Chen discovered how adults benefit from outcome-based, longevity medicine within a community-based environment that focused on purpose, nutrition, movement, and spirituality when he and his family built out ChenMed, America’s leading primary care provider for older adults. As the organization’s Chief Medical Officer, he helped over 200,000 older adults across 15 states significantly improve their outcomes and gain 5-7 healthier years.

Dr. Chen is also an accomplished author, co-writing “The Calling: A Memoir of Family, Faith and the Future of Healthcare,” which outlines his family’s story and their vision for proactive, transformative care. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, as well as a preventative cardiology expert, Dr. Chen is deeply involved in charitable work, supporting medical missions in Nicaragua and at-risk youth through his family’s non-profit, Youth Impact Center. He is married to his medical school sweetheart, Dr. Jessica Chen, ThriveWell’s Chief Health and Wellness Officer and former Chief Clinical Officer of ChenMed. Together, they have four children.

Megan Jenkins

Megan Jenkins joined F-Prime in April 2024. Prior to joining F-Prime, she was Controller at Sandbox Industries managing financial operations, investor reporting, and financial analysis.

Earlier in her career, Megan was a manager at Ernst & Young, LLP in their financial services assurance practice serving public and private clients in the wealth & asset management industry.

Megan earned an MBA and an MS in Accounting from Northeastern University and a BS in Mathematics with a minor in Economics from Union College. She is a Certified Public Accountant.

Allison MacLeod

As CMO of Flywire (Nasdaq: FLYW), Allison sets the company’s marketing and revenue operations strategy worldwide. Since joining Flywire in 2019, Allison has led the growth of its marketing function, building out new teams in APAC and EMEA, and scaling up a new revenue operations function. Allison was also instrumental in leading Flywire to its successful IPO in May, 2021.

She has more than 15 years of marketing experience, including seven years at Rapid7 (Nasdaq: RPD). There, she focused on building and optimizing the company’s growth by building and scaling demand generation, business development, and operations. Previously, she worked at Forrester in several digital and field-based roles.

Allison is on the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, and serves as strategic advisor to early-stage companies. Allison holds a Master of Arts in Integrated Marketing from Emerson College, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Raj Basak, PhD

Raj Basak is a Senior Associate with F-Prime and works across the healthcare sub-sectors including therapeutics, medical technology, and life-sciences tools. Prior to joining F-Prime, Raj was a member of the Healthcare Investment Banking team at Goldman Sachs in New York where he worked on over $15 billion in announced financing and M&A transactions across biopharma.

Raj received his PhD in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University and was a part of the Program in Physics, Engineering, and Biology (PEB). Raj’s doctoral research focused on studying the biophysical mechanisms underlying nociception in sensory neurons. While in graduate school, Raj was also a Canaan-Yale fellow with Canaan Partners and an analyst with Certara.

Prior to graduate school, Raj worked in laboratories at Columbia University Medical Center and Brown University. His research has been published in Biophysical Journal, Nature, Science Translational Medicine, among others. Raj also holds a B.S. in Physics with Research Honors from The Macaulay Honors College at The City College of New York, where he was awarded the Ward medal. His undergraduate thesis focused on interrogating field theory approaches to quantum tunneling.

Cathy Wong

Cathy Wong joined F-Prime as Senior Director of Finance in July 2023. Cathy has over 14 years of accounting and finance related experience. Prior to joining F-Prime, Cathy worked as a Controller in the GP Services and management company at THL. Earlier in her career, Cathy held various accounting and tax roles at Blackstone, Bain Capital, Bain & Company, and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Cathy holds a B.S. in Business Administration with dual concentrations in Accounting and Finance from Boston University. She is a certified public accountant in the state of Massachusetts.

Henry Trapnell

Henry Trapnell joined F-Prime as a Director of Industry Networks to support the firm’s Tech Fund in the U.S. and Eight Roads Ventures abroad. He is a strong believer in the power of community to fuel business growth, and loves connecting portfolio company founders with corporate leaders to build symbiotic partnerships.

Prior to F-Prime, he helped lead digital go-to-market strategy at Google for the company’s hardware & services. He previously advised corporate executives on behalf of J.P. Morgan, where he developed a nuanced understanding of the intersection between emerging technologies, finance, and personal relationships.

Henry graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and studied Economics and Chinese at Boston University. He also serves on the board of the Chestnut Hill Community Association in Philadelphia.

John Shiver, PhD

Dr. John Shiver is a Special Advisor for F-Prime and is also Chief Strategy Officer at IGM ID a wholly owned subsidiary of IGM Biosciences. Established in 2021, IGM ID utilizes a proprietary IgM platform to treat and prevent infectious diseases. The potential utility of this platform for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases is supported by its recent application towards COVID-19 (Ku et al., Nature, published online 03 June 2021).

Prior to joining IGM ID, John was the SVP and Global Head of Vaccines R&D and a member of the Executive Leadership team for 8 years at Sanofi Pasteur, the largest company in the world devoted entirely to vaccines. He previously spent 22 years at Merck & CO where he held a series of senior leadership positions with his last position being VP and Head of Vaccines and Biologics Research. He was a member of Merck Vaccines Integrated Leadership Team and the Global Research Leadership Committee responsible for vaccine research, vaccine clinical assays and biomarkers, and biologics research, and siRNA technologies. Earlier in his career John spent five years at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.

John is a recognized expert and industry leader in vaccine and pharmaceutical research and development. He has guided numerous scientific teams that created novel vaccine and monoclonal antibody candidates to prevent or treat more than 40 infectious and non-infectious diseases, including HIV, influenza, HPV, RSV, CMV, pneumococcus, cancer, and asthma. He has collaborated with other senior leaders to secure the licensure of 14 pharmaceutical products spanning both vaccines and monoclonal antibodies, many of which were first- and/or best-in-class products addressing global infectious diseases. He also championed four acquisitions and three major collaborations to obtain new technologies or clinical candidates/products.

John is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the International Society of Vaccines (ISV) and a member of multiple advisory boards, including the Board of Directors for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Board of Directors for Icosavax, and previously, the Executive Board of the International Society for Vaccines. He has also served on journal editorial boards, including Nature Partner Journals Vaccines and the Journal of Virology. He is the author of more than 150 articles, including 19 in Science, Nature, Cell, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of 68 awarded patents. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania College of Medicine and has been recognized by the Financial Times.

John holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biophysics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Mathematics from Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.

Jillian Enos

Jillian Enos is VP of Finance and joined F-Prime in April 2022. Prior to joining F-Prime, she worked at Charlesbank Capital Partners where she held the position of Valuations and Portfolio Reporting Manager. Jill also worked at PwC for six years, most recently as a Manager in their Assurance practice, where she was primarily focused on private equity and private credit fund clients.

Jill earned her BBA in Accounting from the Isenberg School of Management at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a certified public accountant in the state of Massachusetts.

Andrew Bognanni

Andrew Bognanni joined F-Prime in April 2022 to assist the finance and operations teams at the firm. Prior to joining F-Prime, he was employed by Standish Management where he held the position of Manager. He also worked at RSM in their audit practice.  Andrew holds a M.S. in Accounting from Northeastern University.