Vanloan Nguyen, MBEE, is the Director and President of Berkeley Pharma Tech Foundation and the CEO of Berkeley Pharma Tech, a private, for-profit biotech company. She is a passionate entrepreneur with extensive experience in biotechnology and start-up management. Since 2018, she has primarily worked in venture capital as a fellow at Life Science Angels, where she recruits, screens, and provides guidance to start-up companies.

Prior to her VC experience, she conducted medical research in antibody engineering at Panorama Research Institute, specifically with the goal of creating a novel therapy for erosive bone disease. In 2020, Nguyen joins the SPARK advisors at Stanford, bringing her knowledge as an industry expert to counsel scholars on research and development, clinical care and business.

For a brief time in 2020, she served as the President and Managing Director at PurusBio, a startup working to launch a LAMP device for pathogen testing—a technology which emerges from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—in collaboration with Dr. M. Allen Northrup, Ph.D., FRSC.

Nguyen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a pre-medical focus, later completing a Masters’ Degree in Biotechnology Entrepreneurship and Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University in 2019.

In addition to entrepreneurship, Nguyen is passionate about charity work; she founded the Hmong Crippled Children Charity in 2017, which organizes surgical missions in Vietnam for disabled children.