Graduates
BY N A N CY AVER ETT
A Splendid Second Act
The Power of Three Degrees
Chiyo Moriuchi, MBA ’86, MPH ’15
Nimish Shah, MBA/MPH ’06
The Great Recession propelled Chiyo Moriuchi toward a second career in public health. She had already spent decades working in business, finance, and real estate investment, including a nineyear stint in Tokyo with LaSalle Investment Management. When the financial crisis prompted the firm to offer buyouts, Moriuchi took one. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time for me to do something else,’” she says. While pondering her next move, she served on the boards of several Quaker organizations (Moriuchi herself is a Quaker). “While I was on the board of Medford Leas, a Quaker continuing care retirement community, I became much more aware of the issues” with an aging population, she recalls. Then Moriuchi came across a 2012 New York Times profile of Dean Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, in which Fried discussed how she helped start a volunteer tutoring program to help both senior citizens and children flourish. “I thought, ‘That is the stuff we need to be thinking about and talking about,’” Moriuchi recalls. Soon, she was enrolled in Columbia Mailman School’s Accelerated MPH program. She studied her town, Newtown, Pennsylvania, and found that it had many assets for older people but that elders were separated from the wider community. It also had bumpy, nard-to-navigate sidewalks. After getting her degree, Moriuchi worked as a program manager in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. But she had made connections that led to her becoming, in 2019, the CEO of Friends Village, an independent living and personal care community for older adults in Newtown. The role has allowed her to put her knowledge about healthy aging into practice. For instance, while at Columbia Mailman School, she learned about Senior Planet, a digital and in-person learning community for older adults. So Moriuchi signed up Friends Village, and now she offers free Senior Planet digital literacy classes quarterly to both Friends Village residents and other senior citizens in the area—making the retirement home a hub for senior learning. “I want Friends Village to be part of the wider community, not separated from it,” she says. “Residents can continue to be contributing members, benefiting themselves and the community, and countering society’s ageist attitudes.”
Biostatistics expertise built at Columbia Mailman School has helped Nimish Shah in his work as a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock. He evaluates companies, in part, by examining their clinical trial design. “A company’s value could go down if clinical trials weren’t done right,” he says. At Columbia Mailman School, Shah chose the Health Policy and Management track and remembers vividly the lectures by department Chair Michael S. Sparer, JD, PhD, who detailed the complex process of changing a nation’s laws around drug pricing and health insurance. “It was really eyeopening to me how difficult that can be,” he says. After graduating, Shah worked for Credit Suisse, where he analyzed medical therapeutic companies to help clients make investment decisions. “Then I decided I wanted to do more investing,” he says, so he moved to Citadel and eventually to Venrock. “We take a long-term view on a potential startup,” he says. “We pick a select number of companies to back whose potential we have analyzed carefully.” A finance career wasn’t what Shah envisioned when he got his Bachelor of Science in pharmacy from Rutgers or when he pursued two master’s degrees at Columbia University. But the degrees have helped him. “My pharmacy degree helps me understand if the biology of a new drug makes sense,” he says. “My public health background helps me understand if they designed the right clinical trial, and my MBA helps me think through how big a drug could be.” Shah was an early investor in Biohaven, which created Nurtec, a revolutionary type of drug that blocks a protein that causes some migraines. “I take some pride in the fact that I played a small part in getting this drug to patients,” he says. Biohaven became a wholly owned subsidiary of Pfizer last year in a transaction valued at $11.6 billion.
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COLUM B I A P U BLI C H E A LT H
2023–2024 EDITION
