Dr. Emma Vontz, PhD

Dr. Emma Vontz, PhD is a former academic scientist with over 10 years of experience spearheading scientific discovery and is passionate about forming companies around therapeutics targeting the root causes of disease.

Dr. Vontz completed her PhD under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Starczynowski at the Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where she developed novel drugs to therapeutically target signaling that potentiates Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). Chief among her other discoveries, Dr. Vontz formulated several targeted protein degrader therapeutic compounds that selectively target oncogenic driver proteins, which was published in 2026 in the journal Cell Chemical Biology. What Dr. Vontz loved most about her time at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was talking to her brilliant colleagues about the projects they were working on, companies they were building, and brainstorming new ways to intercept oncogenic signaling.

While she was completing her PhD at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Dr. Vontz also served as a Life Sciences Consultant at JucaBio, supporting licensing and venture transactions with the business development team.  Prior to that, Dr. Vontz was also a Healthcare and Life Sciences Venture Fellow at CincyTech, LLC, a public-private seed-stage investor focused on high-growth life science and technology companies.

Dr. Vontz holds a PhD in Cell and Cancer Biology from University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine and a B.S in Food Biochemistry from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. While at Cornell, Dr. Vontz balanced bring a part of the varsity squash team with undergraduate research. In her personal life she enjoys listening to the Grateful Dead, live music, playing squash and tennis, and hiking alpine mountains with her family.