Life Sciences Voice has announced the winners of its 2025 Rising Stars Award, highlighting emerging executives and operators whose work is shaping the future of the health and biopharmaceutical sectors. Among this year’s honorees are four Indian American leaders: Ritesh Sanghvi of Ipsen, Ajay Sharma of Bayer Consumer Health in North America, Tajinder Vohra of Revvity, and Raj Pudipeddi of Exact Sciences. The New York-based outlet released the winners on August 26, affirming that the cohort was chosen from hundreds of nominations across science, business, and technology.
The Rising Stars program is a barometer of who is poised to shape health innovation beyond the headlines. While established awards often recognize lifetime achievement, this list spotlights operators who are actively building pipelines, scaling access, and retooling how therapies reach patients. For South Asian Americans in the life sciences, the visibility matters: it showcases leadership across the value chain, from corporate development and e-commerce to global operations and growth strategy.
Ritesh Sanghvi leads due diligence, integration, and divestitures at Ipsen, drawing on two decades of product development and corporate development experience. His portfolio aims to ensure the “right” assets are selected, integrated smoothly, and positioned to deliver patient benefit and commercial value. Prior to Ipsen, Sanghvi held roles at AbbVie and Allergan and began his career as a pharmaceutical scientist, a blend of lab and boardroom that is increasingly common among leaders who translate science into access. Diaspora coverage of the awards emphasized his track record of approvals and his academic training across the University of Arizona, Stony Brook University, and the Wharton School.
Ajay Sharma serves as vice president for e-commerce and omnichannel at Bayer’s Consumer Health business in North America. In a market where over-the-counter brands compete in both brick-and-mortar and digital aisles, Sharma’s remit is to connect marketing, data, retailer partnerships, and logistics into a coherent growth engine. As consumer health companies push to personalize recommendations and protect trust in an era of misinformation, his role sits at the intersection of technology and public health outcomes. Reporting on the winners highlighted his previous work in Europe and the U.K. and his decade at Coca-Cola building commercial capabilities across channels – a skillset now being redeployed to increase access and adherence in consumer health.
Tajinder Vohra, senior vice president of global operations at Revvity, oversees manufacturing, supply chain, customer care, and distribution for a company with footprints in both life sciences and diagnostics. Vohra’s team has reengineered fulfillment networks and built digital backbones for e-commerce, battling the operational complexity that can delay research supplies or diagnostic consumables. His earlier roles at ABB, Genpact, and GE Healthcare reflect an operator’s arc that maps well to the sector’s increasing need for resilient, tech-enabled supply chains – a lesson underscored by pandemic-era shortages.
Rounding out the quartet is Raj Pudipeddi, chief growth officer at Exact Sciences, a company known for molecular diagnostics that expand access to early cancer detection and monitoring. Pudipeddi’s career spans medical devices, consumer goods, and telecom across the Americas and Asia Pacific, with stops at Align Technology, Bharti Airtel, and Procter & Gamble. That breadth is increasingly valuable to diagnostics companies navigating direct-to-consumer channels, payer dynamics, and physician adoption all at once. The Rising Stars recognition suggests a mandate to convert that breadth into growth that also advances population health.
For U.S. patients and providers, these recognitions matter because they highlight the people improving the plumbing of innovation, not just the headlines about blockbuster drugs. Corporate development leaders decide which external assets become tomorrow’s therapies. Omnichannel operators help consumer health brands meet patients where they are. Operations chiefs stabilize supply chains for reagents and instruments. Growth executives scale diagnostic tools that can shift care upstream. When these functions run well, the downstream effects include faster trial starts, fewer stockouts, better adherence, and earlier detection – outcomes that translate into lives improved or saved.
The Rising Stars list also underscores the contributions of South Asian Americans across a sector that depends on immigrant talent at every level, from lab benches to boardrooms. The presence of four Indian American honorees among the winners signals a pipeline of leaders who can bridge science with business execution and who bring global perspectives to companies that increasingly operate across continents. That representation can inspire students and early-career professionals to see viable paths into roles that shape how innovation reaches patients.
As with any awards program, the proof will be in what happens next: acquisitions that deliver patient value, digital channels that expand access without compromising accuracy, operations that lower cost while improving quality, and growth strategies that advance early detection and equitable care. But recognition is not trivial. It allocates attention – and with it, capital and career mobility – to leaders doing the unglamorous work of making a complex system function. The Life Sciences Voice 2025 Rising Stars announcement helps direct that attention to a group of professionals who are well positioned to deliver meaningful impact in the coming years.
Key Takeaways About the Indian American honorees
- Four Indian Americans – Ritesh Sanghvi, Ajay Sharma, Tajinder Vohra, and Raj Pudipeddi – were named 2025 Rising Stars.
- The awards recognize emerging leaders driving innovation and patient-centric progress in life sciences.
- Honorees span corporate development, e-commerce and omnichannel, global operations, and growth strategy.
- The cohort reflects growing South Asian American leadership across U.S. healthcare innovation.
- Recognition can accelerate access-focused work that benefits patients, providers, and payers alike.
