Avicena's CEO Named Chairman
October 19, 2007

After some eight years with Avicena Group, transitioning from role to role and helping the company move from private to public, Belinda Tsao-Nivaggioli has been named chairman of the board.

Tsao-Nivaggioli started out as director of research and development at the Palo Alto-based biotech company.  Her job has steaily evolved.

She was Avicena's chief operating officer from 2002 to 2004, then was named chief executive in 2005, before the company when public.  After that step up, she said, she had to learn more about finance and "how to talk about the company in front of investors."

"The big change came from my job having an internal focus to an external focus," she explained.  "I had to learn to present the company in a way that's exciting not just to us but to everybody in the investment community."

Avicena's former chairman Nasser Menhall left the company because he's building a wellness center in Dubai, Tsao-Nigaggioli said, and so her job expanded.

She plans to bring on a few new board members, and said she sees a big part of her new responsibility as "bringing the board members together."

Tsao-Nivaggioli said she's always felt close to the board, but now will need to step forward and direct them.  "This is a big challenge, a new way of doing things for me.  I need to channel decisions and make sure we have a vote."

One constant concern is financing.  "We'll be closing a larger financing shortly, " she said, "and I'll be spending a lot of my time working on that.:

She came to the company from Oral B in Belmont, and before that was in corporate research at Gillette Corp. in Boston.  She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and attended the MIT, where she met her husband.

She and her husband reduce stress by running, mainly in 7K and 12K races.  The Tsao-Nivaggioli family is multi-cultural - she's Chinese and her husband is French - and their 4 year-old son is enrolled in an international school where he learns about those and other cultures.