ABOUT STETSON FAMILY OFFICE

 Connecting Family Offices interested in healthcare

Mission 

Research suggests that one-third to up to one-half of Alzheimer’s Disease cases could be avoided with proper exercise and nutrition. One-third to one-half of cancer is avoidable. Much of diabetes, obesity and heart disease is avoidable.   

Stetson Family Office seeks to engage the public through media much the way President John F. Kennedy did in motivating everyone to take responsibility for his or her health.

THE TEAM

Chuck Stetson, CEO, New York 
Chuck, who is the third generation running the Stetson Family Office, is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. On behalf os Stetson Family Office has started and is Chairman of Healthcare Impact Foundation, a 501-c-3 organization, in 2017 to bring capital and management expertise to life science companies at all stages and to build and maintain an efficient life science eco-system composed of R&D facilities, incubation facilities, venture capital investors, family office investors, and networks of experts in science, management, industry, reimbursement and public policy.  

Chuck also started:  
Global Family Office BioForum with family offices around the globe working closely with their local healthcare innovation.  

Essentials in Education (EIE), a 501-c-3 organization started in March 2001, develops quality instructional materials for schools and colleges. It has recently expanded its educational activities worldwide. EIE has been featured in numerous Associated Press articles, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek and in April 2007 in a TIME Magazine cover story. Chuck has been a guest on FOX News, CBS Sunday Morning and The TODAY Show.  

Private Equity Investors, Inc. (PEI), a SEC Registered Investment Adviser, was started in 1992 by the Stetson Family Office to invest in venture capital and smaller buyout funds. PEI has become a leader in the purchase of secondary interests in venture capital, buyout, growth equity and mezzanine funds or other entities. PEI has purchased approximately 280 interests in over 130 different fund groups. PEI’s holdings, primarily U.S.-based, have included investments in more than 2,000 portfolio companies covering a broad cross-section of economic sectors. PEI has raised and managed over $400 million. PEI has an above average net return on its limited partners.  

Mr. Stetson received his B.A. from Yale University, an M.B.A. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business and an honorary L.L.B. from Concordia University - Portland.  

Eugene Durenard, Managing Director, Switzerland
Eugene brings a thorough multi-asset class investment and entrepreneurial experience spanning 20 years. After obtaining his PhD in Mathematics at Harvard in 1995 he started his career in London in proprietary research at Salomon Brothers, then proprietary trading at Credit Suisse, where he developed a series of quantitative strategies. In 2002 he moved to Bermuda to form his own company where he ran quantitative strategies for several high net worth clients and provided research, development and implementation services for proprietary trading operations at hedge funds and banks. In 2006 he expanded his operations by co-founding Orion Investment Management, an institutional asset manager in Bermuda. He sold it to the privately owned Capital G Bank in 2011 and until 2013 co-headed their asset management, where he was responsible for internal strategies and external managers selection. Prior to joining the Stetson Family Office in early 2016 he was CIO of a NYC single family office operation. Eugene published various innovations to trading and dynamic asset management in several industry articles and a book “Professional Automated Trading, Theory and Practice” (Wiley 2013).  

Grace Mathew, Senior Vice President, Sydney 
Grace works closely with Family Offices across the Asia-Pacific region, including the Private Wealth Network of which Stetson Family Office is a member. Selected as one of Australia’s 100 Brightest Young Minds in 2010, Grace has applied her strengths in communication, leadership, and relationship management to roles in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors, regularly presenting to audiences of up to 60,000 since age 15. She was awarded the Goldman Sachs Global Leader Award in 2008, in recognition of her international achievements in the community and international leadership initiatives.

While earning a Bachelor of International & Global Studies and Master of International Relations from the University of Sydney, Grace also completed postgraduate courses in Political Science at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and Leadership at Sydney’s Alphacrucis College. She was one of three scholarship recipients to attend the Global Leadership Institute in New York, where she represented Australia, engaging with key political, corporate and philanthropic leaders at the United Nations.

Grace’s professional experience ranges from marketing and raising funds for philanthropic organizations such as UNICEF, to helping lead and organize events with over 10,000 attendees. As a freelance writer and presenter, she has been published in magazines such as The Journal and Christian Today, and hosted on-camera interview series for HSCLive, The Jerusalem Peace Project, and many more. Alongside her role representing the Stetson Family Office in the Asia-Pacific region, Grace is Chief Operating Officer of New Hope Capital, and Chief Vision Alchemist for WeThink.Co, where she consults on corporate strategy, communications, and culture.  

Maria Makela, Vice President, New York 
Maria brings 20 years of international market expertise in healthcare and life science to the Stetson Family Office, where she leads a Women in Family Offices initiative to advocate for gender parity in private investment offices. She worked as a business strategist and management consultant to Business Finland (previously Finpro). Maria lead projects on Future Trends for Service Design and was part of all of Finpro’s healthcare and life science engagements and business development initiatives. After Finpro she led the business development efforts of a consortium of Finnish Clinical Research Organizations which were expanding their businesses into the US.

Maria has her Masters in Social Science from the University of Turku, in Finland and a MBA (International Business) from Farleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, NJ. She is a Board Member and Senior Vice President of Finlandia Foundation’s New York Chapter.

Medical Advisors

Paul Bendheim, MD., Dr. Paul Bendheim is a neurologist and Professor of Neurology at the University of Arizona in Phoenix. He is the creator of Brain Savers. He is affiliated with St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center. He received his medical degree from University of Arizona College of Medicine.  

Antonella Santuccione Chadha, M.D. International Medical Affairs Manager, Roche Diagnostics International Ltd. Antonella is the Strategic Lead Officer at Women’s Brain Project (WBP), of which she is the founder. She is a medical doctor with a wealth of experience in the field of Alzheimer’s Disease and psychiatric disorders.  

Pierre J. Magistretti, M.D. is an internationally-recognized neuroscientist who has made significant contributions in the field of brain energy metabolism. His group has discovered some of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie the coupling between neuronal activity and energy consumption by the brain. 

Scientific Advisors

Miia Kivipelto, PhD, is most interested in preventive measures in medicine, an area in which Swedish and Finnish researchers are global leaders. The FINGER* study, which Kivipelto led, was the world's first large multidimensional study of lifestyle interventions. The results have had a major impact on how dementia is viewed and FINGER's methodology will now be used for new studies in the USA, Singapore and China. 

"I believe that at least 30% of Alzheimer's disease is related to factors that can be influenced, including blood pressure, depression, education and physical activity. This is a conservative estimate," says Kivipelto. She is actually more inclined towards 50% of the causes being influenceable.  

Fiona Kerr, PhD is a scientist and researcher exploring what happens in our brains and bodies when we interact with other humans. How does this positively affect our immune systems, or our capacity for complex decision making and trust? And does this change when we interact with or through technology? These questions are at the centre of Dr Kerr’s work as a scientist and researcher. As the Neural and Systems Complexity Specialist at Adelaide University in Australia, Dr Kerr’s work is intrinsically cross-disciplinary, embracing engineering, cognitive neuroscience, the professions and health sciences – for more information about Dr Kerr’s research at the University of Adelaide click here.  

Through The NeuroTech Institute, Dr. Kerr works with government, public and private entities internationally to research complex issues and trial solutions. Dr Kerr works in collaboration with research institutes, tech designers and universities in Europe, North America and Finland. 

Richard Marchase, Ph.D., has over 30 years of experience in research and innovation in the health and life sciences sector. He recently retired from his role as Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

His administrative functions included strategic planning, regulatory oversight, recruitment, and space allocation for a research enterprise generating approximately $450 million annually. He also functioned as the principal university liaison for regional economic development issues and chaired the Board of Innovation Depot, the award-winning business incubator affiliated with UAB. He served on the Boards of the UAB Research Foundation, BioAlabama, the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama Foundation, Alabama EPSCoR, and Southern Research Institute. He currently co-chairs the steering committee of Innovate Birmingham, an academic, civic, and industry partnership to build the technology sector in Birmingham. In 2012 and 2013 he served as Interim President of UAB.

Richard Serbin, Former COO of the Gorlin Companies, a Family Office focused on healthcare investments and Former Head of Business Development at Johnson and Johnson and served on the Board of Directors of 17 domestic and internal subsidiary companies for Johnso and Johnson. He was also Chief FDA Counsel for Revelon and was part of the team at Revelon in the acquisition of healthcare companies. He was also a general attorney, patent attorney and FDA attorney for Schering0 Plough Pharmaceuticals. 

Special Advisor to the CEO

Bud Kirchner, Founder and CEO Kirchner Group has over three decades of operational and scientific experience which includes: a dedicated health and life science team representing a cumulative of 100 plus years of experience spanning operations, advisory and asset management in building, growing fixing and selling businesses. Kirchner Group has extensive intellectual property commercialization expertise having assessed more than 2,000 technologies. It also has strong relationships with numerous strategies in the life science sector. Kirchner Group advised the primary founding investor on due diligence for two of the largest ever Biotech financings: Juno Therapeutics (Series A/B - $310 million)and Denali Therapeutics (Series A - $217 million)