Megha H. Unhelkar joins the 2021 Blavatnik Fellowship as an entrepreneur and a scientist with a passion for improving healthcare.

Prior to the Blavatnik Fellowship, Megha was a Life Sciences Strategy Consultant with Charles River Associates, performing early-stage product feasibility assessments to help guide commercial development of therapies across different areas including oncology, immunology, and rare diseases. Megha’s industrial experience includes working at Celgene to understand the drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics of cancer targeting drugs and at BASF, investigating enzyme kinetics.

Megha earned her PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, where she invented a bioinformatics pipeline to discover new proteins from carnivorous plants to characterize them using NMR. She also earned her MS in Pharmacology from Northeastern University, Boston and BS in Pharmacy from the University of Mumbai. Outside of work, Megha has founded and runs a non-profit called “The Science of Colors”. She also enjoys cooking, reading, and running; she is training for the Chicago 2022 Marathon.