Tania Fernandez, Ph.D

Founder & CEO

Dr. Fernandez is the Founder & CEO of DreamCatcher Ventures, San Francisco, CA. Her decades of experience encompass scientific and medical research, venture capital, finance and entrepreneurship.

Combining the worlds of science and business, Tania specializes in working with investors and entrepreneurs to build and scale businesses effectively through a scientific and commercial analysis of technologies/products, refining of business models, corporate strategy, competitive analysis and market intelligence. Leveraging strong networks of investors, scientific advisors, key opinion leaders and regulators, alliances both nationally and internationally she assesses the risk reward profile of various ventures to create robust strategies for companies and to parallel track development in multiple markets.

Dr. Fernandez has over 16 years of in-depth experience in the life sciences and 10 years of venture investing experience with Burrill & Company, San Francisco, CA, a $1.5 B life sciences venture capital fund. As Director she was responsible for sourcing, evaluating, and executing on several successful investment transactions across the funds. In addition to the US, she also led the firm’s investment strategy for India and cross-border (US-India). She previously held Board/Board observer positions on Adlyfe, Strand, White Glove Health, Bioimagene (exited via a $100M sale to Roche) and the Advisory Board (Finance) for Express Pharma. She is also on the Editorial Board of the “Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied and Biomedical Sciences”. She was also Managing Director at Burrill Equities.

Dr. Fernandez secured her doctorate at the Cancer Research Institute, India, having been awarded the Indo-US scholarship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. Her research work won her the Young Scientist Award in the nation. She was also awarded the most outstanding doctoral thesis award at Bombay (Mumbai) University. Her postdoctoral work at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health resulted in two awards for excellence in biomedical research. She also completed her post-doctoral training in protein chemistry and genetic engineering at the College of Medicine, Texas A&M University. She previously gained operational experience at Hoechst Pharma. Dr. Fernandez works extensively with entrepreneurs and has been/is an instructor/ mentor/investor coach/judge to UCSF, UC Davis, Harvard University and Berkeley.