Illumina Ventures announces new partner, Mara Aspinall, has joined its investment team
Illumina Ventures announced that Mara Aspinall, MBA, has joined the Company’s investment team as a partner.
Most recently, Mara served as co-founder and managing director of BlueStone Venture Partners. Previously, she was president and CEO of Ventana Medical Systems, a billion-dollar division of The Roche Group (now Roche Tissue Diagnostics), where she oversaw a world-class team that achieved more than two dozen major instrument and assay launches, as well as global leadership in companion diagnostics. During her tenure at the Genzyme Corporation, Mara served as President of both Genzyme Genetics and Pharmaceuticals, transforming the former from a small, specialized player to one of the top five clinical laboratories in the US and the latter to an international leader in specialized pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturing. Mara has served on the boards of numerous public and private companies.
Mara was named Arizona Biosciences Leader of the Year by the Arizona Biotechnology Association and one of the “100 Most Inspiring People in Life Sciences” by PharmaVOICE magazine. She co-founded the Biomedical Diagnostics master’s degree program at Arizona State University, the program dedicated exclusively to diagnostics, genetics and genomics. She publishes the widely read Sensitive & Specific: The Diagnostics Newsletter. During the pandemic, she was an advisor to The Rockefeller Foundation on COVID. Mara earned a Master of Business Administration in management from Harvard Business School after receiving a Bachelor of Arts in international relations and Chinese from Tufts University.
