The Power of Three Degrees

Nimish Shah, MBA/MPH ’06

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.