Getting personal with three investment leaders at RA Capital

By Sarah Reed

CULTURE | BIOTECH

September 9, 2025

This article is one in a series seeking to give a face to some of the folks at RA Capital Management toiling away tirelessly and passionately to bring the next generation of medicines to patients. 

RA Capital is incredibly proud to have a number of women in senior positions and a deep bench of female biotech and investment leaders. In this piece, Sarah Reed, RA Capital’s general counsel, spoke with just three of the many phenomenal women here who have been involved in some of our recent high-profile exits.

In some cases, they have decided to share some deeply personal (and sometimes painful) details around the challenges they (and frankly all driven people) face in balancing personal and professional lives. We thank them for their candor and acknowledge the dedication of and various sacrifices made by all of our amazing team members.

Laura Stoppel’s amazing race

You went from the most junior level at RA Capital to becoming our first female partner only eight years out of your MIT PhD program, you have two small children, you have led four investments that have exited for over a billion dollars, and along the way you have earned hundreds of millions of dollars in returns for our investors, and been involved in the development of some transformational drugs –Tell us a bit about your two most recent highly successful private company exits.

Yes, let’s talk about Nimbus and Aiolos instead! They had a lot of similarities that made them attractive acquisition targets: both were developing potentially best-in-class drugs for very large indications – both in the I&I space.

The Nimbus subsidiary had a drug with applications beyond psoriasis, although it was the Phase 2 psoriasis data that catalyzed the M&A process. Aiolos had best-in-class approach to a validated and approved mechanism for asthma and we were awaiting proof-of-concept data in COPD when we invested.

What was the most gratifying thing for you personally as a board member and the RA Capital investment lead for each of those companies?

For Aiolos, it was about seeing how patiently cultivating relationships and credibility pays off. A number of the Aiolos founding investors and management team had been together at Gyroscope, and I formed a relationship with the Gyroscope CEO even though unfortunately we never had the opportunity to invest in Gyroscope – it was acquired by NVS while we were still in diligence. But we had done a ton of work and really got to know the company and the CEO, and all that hard work laid the foundation for a relationship of close trust with the CEO. I was very impressed with him and kept in touch as he started his new role as the CEO of a then-stealth biotech called Aiolos. The founding investors funded Aiolos in stealth, and RA Capital was the only new investor that came in as an extension to their Series A round which had closed only a few weeks prior. They re-opened the round just for us; we put in a meaningful amount of capital, at a step-up to the valuation set merely weeks before. I’m fortunate to work at a firm that does not have an ego, where we are willing to pay up for good opportunities. Our investment closed in October 2023 and Aiolos was sold in January of the following year.

At Nimbus, we are still carrying on with the mission at the parent company level. I love the spirit and tenacity of that company. It is a small biotech that has the courage to go after audacious targets in competitive spaces usually dominated by large pharma. And they don’t back down – case in point, they had a lawsuit with BMS where Nimbus stuck to its guns and ended up reaching a very favorable resolution.

Ah, this is adding up for me now. You and Nimbus share a phenotype. That leads me to ask about a rumor I heard about how RA Capital might have lost you to Hollywood?

Well, it was hardly a fork in the road – maybe more like a spork? The tines were pretty strongly biased towards science and away from sixteen seconds of fame… When I was at MIT I was obsessed with the reality TV show The Amazing Race and was constantly trying to persuade family members and friends to partner with me to try to get on the show. I finally found someone who agreed – an MIT postdoc I had just started dating. (Yes, his willingness paid off – we are now married.) So we made our demo video and submitted our application. We got a call from the casting director who said we were not chosen, but we would be great candidates for Survivor. You know, the MIT nerds trope. We made it to the final round of casting discussions but were ultimately rejected. 

Hollywood’s loss, RA Capital’s and our LPs’ gain! That story does not surprise me. I often hear you describing yourself as competitive, which I love, and which I think is great modeling for other women at the firm. I think a lot of women are reluctant to publicly own that, even though in their heart they know it is true! Where does that competitive instinct come from?

I have an older brother and we are close in age. I grew up idolizing him. Everything he did, I asked myself, why can’t I do it – even better? I became a competitive swimmer from a young age and went on to play water polo at Harvard. For high school I went to a performing arts school – that required a lot of dedication, because you had to audition to get in, and then I had to commute one hour each way to school every day. I played the flute. Don’t laugh! Flute is very cutthroat! There are only two or three flutes in the orchestra.

And flute is actually what led me to science. I applied for a very small, selective freshman seminar at Harvard called The Neurophysiology of Visual Perception. The professor was David Hubel, a Nobel prize winner. I had no idea, I was just interested in the topic. It turned out he also played the flute, and this formed the basis of a great friendship. We would play flute duets together over at Harvard Medical School. He got me set up with my first lab research opportunity and fostered my interest in neuroscience.

How have you managed to balance a meteoric rise to partner with having two small children? Jack is not yet two and Lily is four, right?

That’s right. I’m not sure ​“balance” is the right word. Sometimes I’m standing upright, but other times I am flat on my face, possibly crying. But working moms learn the art of public performance, right? We learn to model ​“I am doing just great thank you!” in the workplace, and the very performance can carry you through. Around the time that the Nimbus M&A transaction was happening, I had a miscarriage. Work was a merciful distraction, but there were times that I was gutted. I remember keeping the game face on during Board calls, and then I would go have a good cry.

So then getting pregnant with Jack was scary. I was at heightened risk for additional miscarriages and was on an emotional edge. I keenly remember the split screen in my own head as I gave a presentation at an industry conference, while waiting for the results of a viability scan.

Because Jack was born just after the Aiolos deal closed, it became a working maternity leave – I did not miss a single board meeting. That was my choice. Jack had colic, and the only way I could get him to stop crying was to put him in a Baby Bjorn bouncer and keep that thing going up and down like a piston, using my foot. That’s what was happening offscreen.

Lily was born six weeks early, and I was hospitalized for five weeks leading up to her birth. It was during Covid, and so I was not allowed to leave my hospital room. I just worked from my bed and dropped off camera when the nurses came to take my blood pressure every hour. Only my RA Capital colleagues knew I was in the hospital. Adding further indignity to my situation, I had an allergic reaction to penicillin while I was there and my body was covered in antihistamine-resistant hives. That finally kept me off-camera altogether!

I am extremely fortunate to have a husband who has put our family and my career before his own. Kind of remarkable for a guy who is co-founder and CTO of a start-up. And I have two beautiful children and they mean the whole world to me.

Laura Tadvalkar goes the distance

I understand that Aliada’s recent exit was rewarding for you not just professionally but also personally. Tell us about that. 

Aliada was really exciting for us since it validated two theses – we were able to find a really promising shelved technology with our friends at J&J, and we were able to build a platform company fully internally. We put together a business plan, and decided that the first program would be a brain-penetrant amyloid antibody.

At the time, we did not know if that mechanism would clear plaque safely and efficiently. But we had a lot of hypotheses for why a brain shuttle drug would be meaningful for patients and pharma. So we started with an audacious goal, a huge unmet need, a big market opportunity and a unique technology angle. 

From a personal angle, my grandfather died of Alzheimer’s when I was young. Sadly, most of my memories of him are from the period when he was already declining. And of course Alzheimer’s has such a big impact on the extended family in so many ways: caregiver burdens (in my memory my father was often on an airplane out to visit his father), emotional toll, and ​“previvor” syndrome (hereditary risk) for the rest of the family. Additionally, we know that Alzheimer’s tends to run in families, and just like many other Americans my family and I have to live with this idea that this disease could just manifest in our lives one day.

I’m so excited that AbbVie will be moving this forward and I’m confident the Aliada drug will be a really important one for Alzheimer’s patients. 

And before that you worked on another exit that set some records I believe? 

Yes, Mariana Oncology was acquired by Novartis for $1 billion up front and $750 million in potential milestones in May 2024. At the time, that made it the second-largest preclinical M&A deal ever and the largest preclinical acquisition ever completed by Novartis. 

Tell us how that company came together. 

Well, we were really excited about the radiopharmaceutical space – we had evaluated a bunch of companies, but did not think anyone was putting all the pieces together in the right way – target, modality, isotope, and indication. We also thought that building in-house R&D and CMC capabilities was the right approach, but no one was doing that either. So we got together with our investor friends Atlas and Access Industries and set about building the radiopharma company that we wished to invest in, one that had both in-house manufacturing (giving them the ability to iterate and optimize molecules really quickly) and R&D. The Mariana team developed unique insights around specific targets – that was a big part of the company’s value proposition. I wish I could tell you more, but those targets were not disclosed prior to the acquisition! 

You did a PhD in Chemical Biology at Harvard – what was the path from pipettes to portfolio company creation? 

I guess I’d have to say it was a wet one. 

Uh, can you elaborate? 

OK, yes, that was a dangerous start! If you’ve been out to the JP Morgan Conference in January you know it’s almost always raining – a good friend from grad school struck up a conversation with Mitsubishi Tanabe’s corporate VC lead while hiding from the rain. He’d been looking for a Venture Associate for a few months, and my friend knew that after five years doing my PhD and a couple of years in consulting, I was really focused on finding a way to build companies and bring new drug ideas to life. One thing led to another, and later that year I had my first job in venture.

Of course, long-distance swimming played a big part in that too…

What, did you have to swim to a job interview in Japan?? 

Haha – no. I grew up swimming and I was a varsity long-distance swimmer at Yale. I think that gave me the perfect mindset to be a venture investor, funnily enough. Distance swimming is all about persistence – you get in the pool every day and come hell or high water you get your five miles in. No one improves without that. When I think about venture, I think about that persistence – you invest in an idea and a team on Day 1, but it can be Day 1000 or Day 2000 before others see what you and the team see. But every single day, you have to get in the pool, banish the doubts from your mind, and have conviction that this is the right idea and the right team to bring something new into the world.

I probably could have just said that – much like our great management teams – I and the other Venture team members have a high pain tolerance!

How did you end up at RA Capital? 

While I was at MP Healthcare Venture Management I served as the part-time director of BD for one of their portfolio companies, Ribometrix, and helped them get a deal done with Vertex. Josh Resnick was on the Board at Ribometrix, and after he left SV Health Investors to come to RA Capital, he recruited me to join the team. 

Was there any water involved? 

Well, I do have an open invitation out to RA Capital leadership for a mile swim race, but so far no one’s taken me up on that! 

Jokes aside, I was beyond thrilled to join the team here. It felt like just a few years ago I was a stereotypical grad student spending 16 hours a day in a lab and living in an apartment with cardboard boxes as shelves, and suddenly I had this incredible opportunity to work with people at the forefront of science and innovation. On top of that, it’s a place where I can make a tremendous professional impact while also starting a family, which is still too rare for a lot of women in the workforce.

Oh right – I almost lost track! Tell us about your life outside of RA.

My sons Cameron and Devin are three-and-a-half years old and eight months old, respectively. If you do the math, you can see that I’ve timed my maternity leaves perfectly to coincide with market… turbulence. The data on that approach has not read out yet… Maybe a better accomplishment is that at 39 weeks pregnant with Devin I was able to see the Aliada acquisition close, and almost exactly one week later Devin arrived – I’m glad he decided not to celebrate with us! 

Meanwhile, Cam is honing his talents as a burgeoning scientist. He’s been taking the Marie Curie approach to testing dirt’s impact on the microbiome; to be honest, not looking forward to that experimental data. More seriously, as every parent knows, having kids is an incredible blend of ​“beyond challenging” and ​“infinite reward” – I’m grateful to get to hang out with these two.

Meanwhile, my husband Chetan started a biotech in the RNA medicine space last year – I’m very glad that watching what I do as a VC didn’t make him renounce startups! We’re both lucky to be surrounded by amazing colleagues while also doing things we love.

Nandita Shangari could have been a pharmacist

In the scientific spirit of distinguishing causation from correlation, I have to begin by asking you what will seem like a non-sequitur: is any part of your name Laura, and are you a swimmer?

I was born in and I grew up in Delhi. That is both a non-sequitur and a definitive answer to your two questions. But – I am considering adding Laura somewhere to my name.

OK, that means we will have to round out our job qualifications. Tell us about Capstan, a company you helped put together, and then saw through to a sale to AbbVie for the largest upfront amount ever paid for a pre-clinical company.

Capstan will always feel like one of those ​“full-circle” journeys for me – a story that started with CD19 CAR‑T in oncology and somehow found its way into making cell therapies accessible for autoimmune diseases. In many ways, it feels like the arc of a career (and a therapeutic concept) folding neatly back on itself, closing a loop that began more than a decade ago.

Capstan was the work of many people. But for me, everything about my work with the company was sharpened by the experiences, exposures, and lessons I had accumulated throughout my career.

So let’s go back a bit further then – what was that foundation? 

I cut my teeth at Novartis, a company that gave me more opportunities than I probably deserved. I had amazing mentors there and was able to take on roles I wasn’t conventionally trained for to see the bigger picture. In Preclinical Safety, I quickly learned the limits of staring at data in isolation. It gave me one window into drug development, but I wanted a whole house of windows. That itch landed me in oncology project management, as Global Program Manager for a deal you may have heard of – Novartis teaming up with UPenn on CTL019, Carl June and Bruce Levine’s brainchild, which became Kymriah.

How did that earlier cell therapy experience shape your view of Capstan?

I watched Kymriah change lives in the clinic, and I also saw the storm of manufacturing headaches and access issues that came with it. The lesson stuck with me: transformational science needs transformational delivery. You can’t change the world if you can’t scale.

In 2018, I had an opportunity to join Novartis Venture Fund in Boston. Uprooting the family from New York City was not part of our master plan but the chance to step into a role where I could invest in, build, and live at the frontier of biotech innovation as my day job felt too rare to pass up. Fast forward a couple of years when we had an opportunity to invest in a cell therapy company called TeeFib. Given my long history with UPenn and cell therapy, it made sense for me to dig in. By mid-2021, we – and that ​“we” early on included NVF and OrbiMed, later joined by other partners like RA Capital and Vida – were rolling up our sleeves to re-shape TeeFib into what became Capstan. 

The North Star was simple but ambitious: take the efficacy of cell therapy and turn it into a drug product that patients everywhere could actually access. Capstan had its share of twists, turns, and ​“are we sure this works?” moments. But under Laura Shawver’s leadership, the team gelled into a unit that could execute, pivot, and – most importantly – tell us when something wasn’t worth chasing. That level of trust is rare and invaluable.

What made Capstan particularly special for me was how it layered world-class science onto the lessons I had carried throughout my career. I had seen this target from different vantage points, invested through both corporate and institutional lenses, and learned when to double down and when to hold back. It reminded me of the hero/​zero reality of investing, where large amounts of capital are put to work with the hope of reaching true inflection points – in this case, the Phase 1 healthy volunteer study in May 2025 and the company’s acquisition by AbbVie.

Would you describe yourself as driven?

Yes – but that was not forged in the swimming pool or on the sports field. Growing up in Delhi at an all-girls school, sports simply weren’t a thing. The real sport was studying – and you had to play to win.

Layer on the universal truth of Indian parents, and you’ve got a cocktail of expectation that would put Red Bull to shame. Not that they ever had to push me or my sister; we were experts at doing it ourselves.

Really? They never verbalized a desire that you or your sister should be a doctor?

My sister is a doctor – the model child who executed the family blueprint with surgical precision. I, however, am the black sheep. My father’s master plan was elegant in its simplicity: one daughter becomes a doctor, the other a pharmacist, and together we form a bulletproof family enterprise. Only, I went completely off-script.

To this day, he’ll still slip it into conversation: ​“Have you thought about Pharmacy? It’s a stable career.”

Somewhere, in an alternate timeline, my sister and I are running a tidy little clinic in Toronto – Shangari & Daughters Medical Associates – while my dad beams in the waiting room, telling anyone who’ll listen that his life’s plan worked perfectly.

Instead, he got… me.

What were the sacrifices your parents made for you two?

My parents were the first in their families to go to college, and my dad had one grand mission in life – make sure his kids got the best education possible. Unfortunately, he quickly realized he was fighting against societal and cultural impediments for women in India. His conclusion? ​“If we stay here, these girls will not amount to anything!”

So, in his late 40s, with a comfortable middle-class job at Merck KGaA and inspired by a vacation to America – where women (back then at least) seemed to have significant autonomy – he uprooted the entire family and moved to Rochester, New York.

The landing was less glamorous. He left Merck and instead took on a graveyard-shift convenience-store job. My mother, once a high school math and science teacher, was suddenly wrangling toddlers in daycare. For five years, we mostly saw them as blurry figures passing in the night.

And yet, decades later, the gamble paid off. All those years of sacrifice and chaos ended up with me working at RA Capital, in a career my parents couldn’t have even fathomed when they dreamed their immigrant dream – and my sister treating people for a living as a doctor. For my parents, it was proof that the madness had been worth it. For me, it was proof that sometimes, against all odds, the plot twist actually sticks the landing.

So, not exactly feeling the American Dream when you first got here?

First of all, my sister and I thought we had a perfectly good life in India – and we did. At ages 12 and 13, we weren’t exactly mapping out career trajectories. So it was quite the shock to tumble a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder and discover that, in our new public school, we were basically the only brown faces in the building.

On my very first day, they parked me in ESL – because, obviously, foreigner! By the end of the day, they admitted my English was perfectly fine. Then came the kicker: ​“Would you like to continue in this class?” My response: ​“Yes – and get an easy A, absolutely.”

Where did you do your college and graduate studies?

Right after I finished high school, we relocated to Canada for a few reasons: my dad had landed a job in pharma there, and my parents had secured Canadian residency. As a result, I only applied to colleges there – which is how I ended up doing both my undergraduate degree and my PhD at the University of Toronto.

Tell us about your family. 

My husband, Puneet, works in finance and made what might be one of the rarest moves in the industry: leaving New York City for Boston when we relocated for the NVF job in 2018. It wasn’t the standard playbook move, but he didn’t hesitate — and neither did his mom. She has always lived with us and, together with our nanny, has been absolutely essential to my ability to manage life as a working mom.

I had both my kids, Arya (10) and Pia (8), while working in the oncology group at Novartis. I will always be grateful to Novartis — not just for the exceptional female mentors I found there, but also for their generous maternity leave policy. Being able to take five and a half months off with each child felt almost mythical in corporate America, and it was only possible because I had an incredible support system at work. I was surrounded by people who believed that careers are marathons, not sprints.

In many ways, that lesson was already etched into me. Watching my own parents uproot their lives, start over in a country they barely knew, and slowly rebuild both their careers and their community showed me that resilience and family support are the real foundations of any success. That perspective has grounded me through every career choice and every stage of parenthood — and it reminds me daily that none of this is possible alone.

My kids don’t really have a clue what Puneet does – finance is just ​“numbers on a screen” to them – but my work feels more tangible. They understand that what I do can make a real difference for sick people and their families, and they’re proud of that. Which, as a working mom, is one of the best feelings in the world.

And honestly, most days I’m still thinking to myself: pinch me. How does this girl from Delhi get to sit at the apex of the investment world, talking to brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs who genuinely believe that her perspective is worth listening to?