For all the tremendous educators she has had, Natalie J. Guo has her greatest teachers—her mother and father—to thank for the two lessons that have been most formative in her upbringing.
Her father, through his journey from a seaside village in education-poor, revolution-torn China to a research career around the world, taught her the important irony of dreaming boundlessly while remaining rooted in gratitude and humility. To appreciate that you are at once exceptional beyond measure and also wholly ordinary—not above any one or thing—is the most productive and responsible realization of the New American experience for Natalie. It is this which propels her, like her father, to commit daily to using her gifts—both hardwon and undeserved—in service of others.
Her mother, part humanist part scientist, taught Natalie to trust in both statistics and story. It is through this lens that Natalie sees the world: aggregations of numbers and charts mean little without the color and texture of human experience, and anecdotes derive power and rigor from analytical distance.
At the intersection of these two philosophies is a calling to the science, care and economics of human health, where data and human stories converge. Originating at her parents’ lab benches, Natalie was first drawn to the topic of human disease through science: eventually conducting research in infectious disease at Karolinska, stem cell-derived organogenesis in Singapore’s Biopolis, and the tumor microenvironment at Princeton. For these early achievements, Natalie was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship.
As her study of the healthcare system deepened, exposure to vaccine shortages and drug pricing incited Natalie’s fascination with the economics of healthcare. She spent her early career with Goldman Sachs and TPG advising and investing behind management teams of hospitals, insurers, and biopharma. These experiences gave her insight into how balancing mission and profits can both conflict and converge within organizations that affect millions of lives.
Drawing on her family’s history of assimilation and cultural independence, embedding in disparate professional communities and translating their unique and shared goals is Natalie’s approach to restructuring problems of coordination that exist today between institutions, caregivers and their patients. Natalie recently completed her MBA at Harvard Business School and currently attends Harvard Medical School. Central to Natalie’s work is the recognition that the effective collaboration of physicians, innovators, and business leaders is critical to transforming how we care for our healthy and our sick. Her hope is to accelerate the delivery of the next generation of healthcare innovation by leveraging both the compassion of human experience and the objective power of data-driven inference.
