Sonia Hallen, PhD, joined LSP in 2019. She is an Associate within LSP's investment team focused on unlisted equities and is involved in all stages of the investment process. Within LSP, her primary role is in initial deal flow screening, and in-depth scientific and clinical due diligence on investment opportunities for their future potential.
Sonia comes from an entrepreneurship background and brings a unique perspective to the LSP team. She has founded two companies: as CEO of InfectDetect, her first start-up in infectious disease diagnostics, Sonia led her team to be awarded the National UK prize at the prestigious BiotechnologyYES Business Competition; she drives business development in her most recent company in digital health, Digital Biosciences, which uses artificial intelligence to drive clinical trial design and deliver more ground-breaking medicines to patients in need. Prior to this, Sonia was a consultant at Accenture UKI within the Life Sciences practice where she led operational and commercial strategy for major global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Before joining Accenture, Sonia was a Stem Cell Scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in Melbourne, Australia, where her research focused on smart biomaterial-based culture systems using human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells to rebuild the heart. Prior to this, she worked with the Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, and was a Bioengineer with the Swiss Red Cross. Sonia has participated as a speaker in renowned scientific meetings and authored a number of high impact scientific publications.
Sonia was awarded a PhD from Imperial College London in Regenerative Medicine, supervised by Prof. Molly M. Stevens, an MSc from EPFL in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and a BEng from McGill University in Chemical Engineering and Organic Chemistry. Sonia is a former professional contemporary dancer and lives in Amsterdam with her husband.
