Stephanie Bova is a digital health expert who has dedicated her life and career to supporting the newest, most innovative advances in pharmaceuticals and healthcare. She is currently the head of Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ Digital Accelerator, where she applies her passion and expertise to create comprehensive, well-organized marketing strategies and lead commercial development for cutting-edge pharmaceutical products.
Technology played an important part in Stephanie Bova’s life from a young age. After learning basic computing from a magazine subscription that her parents bought for her, Stephanie Bova was able to code the message “Happy Birthday Jean” to appear on her Apple Ile computer for her mother’s birthday; her accomplishment took on an added significance because it created a memory that Stephanie shared with her mother and her grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s. In addition, albeit more recently, Stephanie developed a learning algorithm that used data to help teach her son Blaise to sleep through the night when he was only three years old.
After spending several years teaching English in Japan, Stephanie Bova transitioned into the healthcare industry. In 2003, she earned her first experience in the field when she proposed patients participating in clinical trials photograph themselves taking their medications via their phones to ensure that the patients actually took them. While her subsequent projects may be larger in their scope—for example, a recent project saw the use of 3D films to learn how patients experience heart attacks or strokes “in first person”—the drive to improve patient experiences and outcomes remains at the core of everything Stephanie does.
Stephanie Bova also serves on the Board of Advisers of Hoy Health, a firm that focuses on addressing the health and wellness needs of the U.S. Latino population.
In recognition of her accomplishments, Stephanie Bova has been named to Pharmaceutical Executive’s “Top 40 Under 40” list as well as Medical, Marketing, and Media’s (MMM) Top Healthcare Transformer for 2015. She serves on the board of the Healthcare Business Women’s Association, BrainBoost, and she is also a mentor for startups in healthcare tech with MassChallenge and serves as a guest lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s graduate school of neuroscience and INSEAD in Paris.
Stephanie Bova earned her bachelor’s degree in International Business and Japanese language from the University of Buffalo and her MBA from the University of Maryland. She currently lives in Zurich, Switzerland, with her partner, Christophe, and her son, Blaise.
Stephanie Bova 