Head, Healthcare & Life Science, Venture Capital BD, Google Healthcare and Life Science Startups, Google
Dr. Joe Shonkwiler is currently leading the Healthcare and Life Science (HCLS) practice for startups and investors at Google Cloud. Dr. Shonkwiler joined Google from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal agency established by the Biden administration to invest in breakthrough technologies and transform medicine. He served as ARPA-H’s founding Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Acting Deputy Director. In those roles he led all the business and administrative operations for the agency, including commercialization, finance, AI and data infrastructure, IT, contracting and acquisitions, and human resources. Since founding in 2023, ARPA-H has deployed over $2B in nondilutive funds to transform health and biomedical R&D. Prior to ARPA-H, Dr. Shonkwiler was part of the HCLS startup BD team at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In that role, he advised hundreds of healthcare and life science startups, guiding them from conception to exit. He also founded and hosted the AWS Health Innovation Podcast, a weekly show featuring entrepreneurs and investors driving progress in healthcare and life science globally. Prior to joining Amazon, Dr. Shonkwiler was an early employee and VP at Aledade, a venture-backed startup helping independent primary care practices succeed in value-based care. In that role, he drove national implementation of Aledade’s software and services, expanding coverage across 40 states and 500 practices to serve over 500,000 Medicare beneficiaries. Before Aledade, he was the CEO of CollectedMed, a cloud-based health education software startup spun out of Columbia University’s Department of Surgery. Dr. Shonkwiler served on Capitol Hill as the Senior Health Policy Advisor for former United States Senator Rob Portman, handling all federal health policy matters. He began his career as a general surgery resident at Columbia University Medical Center/New York Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Shonkwiler has a BA from the University of Notre Dame, an MD from Columbia University, an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and an MPP from Princeton University.