The accidental path into healthcare
I didn't set out to work in healthcare. The path went MarTech, then ITC consumer health, then Brandtouch, then Proactive For Her — and what I noticed somewhere in the middle of that sequence was that the problems I was drawn to all had the same shape. They were problems where the consumer didn't yet have a way to talk about what they needed, and where the work was less about persuading them to choose us and more about giving them the language to choose at all. By the time I joined PFH, I had stopped pretending that was a coincidence.
What I care about, and why
I care about the categories where the gap between the clinical reality and the public conversation is the widest. Reproductive health in India is the obvious example — there's a generation of women whose questions outpaced the vocabulary their mothers had been given to answer them — but the pattern repeats. I think a lot about the relationship between trust and scale: the way a brand that earns the right to talk about something difficult can do work that no campaign budget can buy. Most of what I've built has been an attempt to extend that trust into one more category at a time.
The Imperial pivot
Imperial is a deliberate choice, not a default one. I want time with people who think about innovation in healthcare from inside the strategy and policy side as well as the commercial side. I'm interested in the post-MBA roles where the operator and the strategist live in the same person — EiR work, founder's office at a healthtech, innovation manager at a pharma company that takes commercial seriously, alliance work at an impact org. I don't think I'll be ready to choose between those four until I've spent a year with the cohort.
A few personal notes
I'm from Calcutta and Bangalore in roughly equal parts. I read more non-fiction than I should and re-read Atul Gawande every other year. I'm slow to start writing and quick to throw it away once I've started; I've made peace with the ratio. I run, badly, every morning. I keep meaning to learn to cook one full Bengali meal end-to-end and have so far made it as far as the dal.
You can find me at tisha@tishabanerjee.com, or on LinkedIn.