WittKieffer Expands Global Purpose-Built Team for Investor-Backed Healthcare and Life Sciences
WittKieffer, a premier executive search and leadership advisory firm, today announced a significant milestone in its multi-year strategic initiative to create a global team purposefully...
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WittKieffer, a premier executive search and leadership advisory firm, today announced a significant milestone in its multi-year strategic initiative to create a global team purposefully built to serve for-profit healthcare and life sciences companies and the investors fueling their growth. Growing more than tenfold over four years, this integrated team now numbers more than 50 world-class professionals across multiple leadership consulting disciplines. With this depth and breadth of expertise, WittKieffer achieves a new level of capability to help clients accelerate value creation through impactful leadership.
This strategically assembled team was created to address a specific market need: providing leadership solutions that move at the pace of investment and innovation. Each consultant was handpicked from top global firms and specialized boutiques for their deeply relevant experience with investor-backed organizations. Operating as one global team, they are unconstrained by traditional regional structures, allowing them to think creatively about client challenges and deploy the right expertise to achieve clients’ desired outcomes.
“Our rapid growth underscores the market’s demand for agile, deeply specialized leadership solutions,” said Andrew Chastain, President and CEO of WittKieffer. “We built this team to challenge convention—integrated, collaborative, and globally connected—to help clients shape leadership teams that drive transformation and accelerate value.”
The team’s integrated approach provides a suite of solutions—executive search, interim leadership, and leadership advisory—tailored to an organization’s precise needs at every stage of its journey. This model fosters true partnership with shared accountability, shifting the focus from transactional services to transformational solutions.
“The engine of modern healthcare is fueled by capital, but it is ultimately steered by leadership,” said Michael Castleman, Executive Partner. “We recognized that the foundation of an integrated approach to impactful leadership—right people, right capabilities, and right alignment to create value—was universally applicable. But we also recognized that for-profit companies and their investors demand specific implementations of this approach that match their pace and performance needs. Those needs are the essence of our purpose-built team.”
WittKieffer’s recent senior-level appointments are a testament to the team’s global and specialized design:
- Jennifer Borrer (Lausanne, Switzerland), who brings 20 years of senior executive talent experience serving Swiss, European, and global life sciences clients, with a particular focus on consumer health, medtech, and biotech.
- Natasha Bunten Cashen (Boise, ID, USA), who specializes in on-demand and interim leadership to accelerate value creation for investor-backed healthcare companies, leveraging 15 years of private equity and operational leadership experience, including leading teams through multiple private equity-led transactions.
- Julie Chavey (Atlanta, GA, USA), who offers more than 20 years of executive recruiting experience for venture- and private equity-backed healthcare, healthtech, and life sciences companies.
- Charlie Fick (Seattle, WA, USA), who has advised venture, private equity, and portfolio company clients across the healthcare technology and services landscape for over a decade, completing more than 150 C-suite searches.
- Virginie Lleu (Paris, France), who for more than two decades has advised healthcare and life sciences firms on leadership strategy, with a particular focus on the French market.
- Evan Markou (New York, NY, USA), who has served for 15 years as a trusted advisor to investors, boards, and executives in emerging growth companies across biotech and biopharma, diagnostics, and medtech.
- Tjai M. Nielsen, Ph.D. (Greensboro, NC, USA), recognized as a Top 25 Private Equity Consultant by the Consulting Report, who counsels private equity, venture capital, and Fortune 500 leaders on CEO succession, M&A effectiveness, assessment and development, and organizational performance.
- George Quinn (Chicago, IL, USA), who brings deep expertise in executive talent, strategic consulting, and talent advisory to deliver tailored interim and on-demand leadership solutions to life sciences clients.
While part of a specialized, purpose-built team, these exceptional professionals—together with their more than 40 colleagues across the United States and Europe—remain deeply connected within WittKieffer. They work in close collaboration with counterparts in not-for-profit healthcare, academic medicine, and higher education, ensuring that the firm brings the insight, expertise, and talent network needed to maximize impact across the highly interconnected Quality of Life Ecosystem.
