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Roxana Daneshjou (2014 Fellow) Joins New Venture Bringing Academic Scientists into Healthcare Entrepreneurship

April 22, 2026

Roxana Daneshjou, a 2014 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and Stanford faculty member, has joined Treehub as a founding investor. Treehub is a newly launched residency program designed to help scientist-founders turn research into healthcare companies.

Treehub, backed by the AI Health Fund and situated just off Stanford’s campus, targets the gap between academic discovery and venture-fundable startups. The program runs cohorts of up to ten companies four times per year and commits capital before companies are formally incorporated, giving researchers early access to funding, mentorship, and operational support.

Roxana brings to Treehub a research background that spans bioengineering, genetics, and clinical dermatology. After completing a BS at Rice and her MD and a PhD in genetics at Stanford, she trained in dermatology there as well and completed a postdoc in biomedical data science. Her current faculty work spans several of Stanford’s AI and medicine initiatives, including the Center of Excellence for Precision Health and Pharmacogenomics, the Stanford Skin Innovation and Interventional Research Group, and affiliate roles with Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and AI in Medicine and Imaging centers.

Treehub focuses on three areas where it sees the most opportunity: precision outcomes driven by genomics and personalized care, care efficiency through AI-assisted tools, and frontier science including robotics and digital simulation.

“I’ve spent years consulting for venture capital and saw time and time again that VCs would pass on exceptional academic founders because those founders did not know how to oresent their story. With Treehub, we help prepare the brightest academic founders to be successful in launching their companies and raising capital.”

– Roxana Daneshjou

Treehub’s founding team also includes Mary Minno, a former venture-backed founder and Google product executive; Derek Minno, who previously oversaw a multi-billion dollar portfolio at Point Capital; and Alexander Ioannidis, an assistant professor of biomedical data science and genetics at Stanford and founder of Galatea Bio. Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe, supports as operating partner.

The inaugural cohort is set to launched this past spring. Applications are open at jointreehub.com.

Roxana’s parents immigrated to the United States from Tehran in the late 1970s as the Iranian Revolution was gaining momentum. Influenced by her father’s love of science, Roxana attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science and was named a Siemens Westinghouse Technology Competition Semifinalist. At Rice University, where she studied bioengineering as a Goldwater Scholar, she taught Sunday school at the Houston Baha’i center and joined Beyond Traditional Borders, an interdisciplinary program where undergraduates work on solutions to global health challenges. There she helped develop a diagnostic lab-in-a-backpack—a solar-powered travel kit containing medical tools designed for resource-limited settings. That was all before she became a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow as a graduate school student at Stanford. 

Roxana’s connection to the Paul & Daisy Soros community runs deep. After receiving the Fellowship in 2014, she became actively involved with the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows Association (the PDSFA), serving as West Coast activities coordinator before taking on the chair role in 2018. As chair, she served on the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships board of directors and led alumni activities for hundreds of Fellows—organizing speaker series, community events, and programming that brought the Fellowship’s network together across the country.