Lisa Burns
President and Chief Executive Officer
Lisa Burns is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Burns McClellan, Inc., one of the country’s largest independent healthcare public and investor relations firm. Since its establishment in 1988, the Firm has represented more than 200 of the industry’s pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies through all phases of development and commercialization. Pharmaceutical firms Baxter, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hoffmann-La Roche, Novartis, Rhône-Poulenc Rorer, Syntex Corporation, Teva Pharmaceutical, Wyeth-Ayerst, and Warner Chilcott, and life sciences firms Alkermes, Cephalon, COR Therapeutics, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Gilead Sciences, Human Genome Sciences, Intra-Cellular Therapies, ISTA Pharmaceuticals, Kolltan Pharmaceuticals, The Medicines Company, OSI Pharmaceuticals, and SUGEN are among the industry’s leaders that have retained Burns McClellan.
Burns McClellan provides investor and public relations services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, drug delivery, diagnostics and device companies both domestically and globally. The Firm has extensive expertise in providing strategic guidance in the areas of financial, scientific, regulatory, crisis and issues communications.
Over the past two decades, Ms. Burns has provided strategic financial counsel to both early- and late-stage companies, with a particular focus on securing access to institutional investors, and has enduring relationships with the leading venture capitalists investing in the life sciences sector. Ms. Burns has been instrumental in assisting companies with strategic positioning and fundraising rounds from seed and private financings through initial public offerings, reverse mergers or other approaches to entering the public markets, as well as numerous follow-on public financings.
Ms. Burns has extensive experience with hostile takeovers; most recently, she provided strategic advice to executive management teams during three highly visible hostile takeovers in the biopharmaceutical industry.
In the communications area, Ms. Burns’ expertise includes investor and media relations, corporate development and strategic consulting, new product launches, and crisis management. Ms. Burns has worked on product development and issues management in such areas as women’s healthcare, neurology, oncology, hematology, cardiology and obesity/metabolic disorders.
Ms. Burns served as a member of the Board of Directors of Genesis Pharmaceuticals and was a board member of Sapient Health Network (currently a division of Web MD/Healtheon) and the Irvington Institute. Ms. Burns was a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research (SAWHR), and the founder of its corporate advisory council. Prior to founding Burns McClellan, Ms. Burns served ten years as a member of senior management at several leading public relations firms, including Fleishman-Hillard International Communications, Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, and Burson-Marsteller.
Justin Jackson
Executive Vice President, Public Relations
Justin Jackson joined Burns McClellan in August 1991. Prior to taking on his current role as Executive Vice President and Director of Public Relations at Burns McClellan, Mr. Jackson served as a Vice President, Director and Senior Vice President in the firm’s San Francisco and New York offices.
In 1994, Mr. Jackson opened and headed Burns McClellan’s San Francisco office until his return to New York two years later. He has coordinated a number of important communications programs at the BMc, including meetings before the FDA, peer-review announcements and industry round-ups. His communications expertise includes small molecule discovery and development, drug delivery, gene-based therapies, ophthalmology, oncology and infectious disease, as well as media relations targeting the financial community. He has been a speaker at industry forums including New Leaf Venture Partners’ annual meeting for its portfolio companies.
Prior to joining Burns McClellan, Mr. Jackson served as scientific editor and writer for The Princeton Review. Previously, he completed the Advanced Pathophysiology Pathway program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Mr. Jackson began his career in public relations at Burson-Marsteller and R.C. Auletta, both in New York.
Mr. Jackson earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University.
Angeli Kolhatkar
Vice President, Investor Relations
Angeli Kolhatkar joined the Burns McClellan investor relations team in early 2013. Angeli has been involved with the biotechnology sector since 1989. She began her Wall Street career on the sell side at Alex. Brown and Sons from 1989-1993, then joined Lehman Brothers from 1993-1996 and worked with the Institutional Investor’s All-America’s Research Team top-ranked analyst in biotechnology. In 1996 she moved to the buy side joining Weiss Peck and Greer’s Small Cap Growth and Equity Healthcare Group as a research analyst covering biotechnology, then from 1998 to 2001 was a Managing Director at the Galleon Group where she covered the biotechnology sector for the Galleon Healthcare Funds and a co-managed the Galleon Life Sciences Fund. In 2001, she co-founded Argus Partners, a long/short, broad-based healthcare equity hedge fund with over $1 billion in assets, where she was a biotechnology analyst for the Argus Healthcare Funds and a co-portfolio manager of the Argus Life Sciences Fund. In 2006 she co-founded Laurient, LLC, an internet-based research database of 300+ biotech and pharmaceutical companies designed to address the needs of healthcare investors.
After graduating from college Angeli was a research technician at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the Laboratory of Peptide Hormone Action from 1984-1988. There she co-authored several scientific publications. She earned her Masters in Business Administration with a concentration in finance from New York University, Stern School of Business in 1991.