Staff
Melissa Buckley
Director, Innovation Fund
Melissa Buckley is director of the CHCF Innovation Fund. Melissa leads the foundation’s efforts to bring health care payers and providers together with entrepreneurs and investors in order to solve important problems in the safety-net delivery system.
Stella Tran
Senior Program Investment Officer
Stella Tran is a senior program investment officer with the CHCF Innovation Fund, where she invests in early- and growth-stage health companies that enable access to care, improve quality of care, and promote health equity.
Lisa Aliferis
Senior Communications Officer, Innovation Fund
Lisa Aliferis is the senior communications officer for the CHCF Innovation Fund. She also leads CHCF’s communications efforts on CalAIM.
James Precour
Program Associate, Innovation Fund
James Precour is a program associate for the CHCF Innovation Fund.
Advisers
Ambar Bhattacharyya
Managing Director, Maverick Ventures
Ambar Bhattacharyya is a managing director at Maverick Ventures, a $400 million venture capital fund based in San Francisco. He currently sits on the board of directors of Artemis Health, Docent Health, Centivo, and Cityblock Health, and serves as a board observer at Collective Medical Technologies and hims. He was previously a board observer at Homology Medicines.
Brian Chee
Managing Partner, Polaris Partners
Brian Chee is managing partner at Polaris Partners, a $5 billion private investment firm focused on venture capital investments in health care and technology.
Martin Felsenthal
Partner, Health Velocity Capital
Martin Felsenthal is a venture capital and growth-stage investor who has focused exclusively on investing in and working with innovative health care services and health care software companies since 1992. He has provided capital to a number of companies that helped create new industries in health care and to companies that became market leaders.
Chris Grant
Senior Vice President, Kaiser Permanente & KP Ventures
Chris Grant is chief operating officer and executive vice president for Kaiser Permanente, The Permanente Federation LLC and serves as a member of the senior executive management team. Grant supports the work of nearly 23,000 physicians and 80,000 employees across the Permanente Medical Groups, which provide care to 12.3 million Kaiser Permanente members.
Meera Mani
General Partner, Town Hall Ventures
Meera is a General Partner at Town Hall Ventures. At Town Hall, she has led investments in the areas of healthcare AI, youth mental health, dementia care, rural health, and senior care. Meera is a physician and neuroscientist by training, and was previously a Senior Partner in McKinsey & Company’s healthcare practice focused on tech-enabled consulting. She brings over 20 years of experience across the healthcare value chain.