Deanna Portero

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

“Addicted to solving complicated problems, relentlessly mirthful, shamelessly curious.” 

Hometown: Queens, New York

Fun fact about yourself: I have three children ages eight, six, and three.

Undergraduate School and Degree: I studied philosophy and psychology at Dartmouth College.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Before coming to Johns Hopkins to pursue a dual MBA/MPH degree, I worked at the National Institutes of Health where I was a management analyst. I coordinated partnership programs related to gene therapy and genome editing.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2024? I interned at Dark Horse Consulting, a global boutique consulting firm that focuses on gene and cell therapies. There, I looked at regulatory convergence across a number of major and emerging markets.

Where will you be working after graduation? After graduation, I will be the Vice President of Partnerships and Innovation at Orphan Therapeutics Accelerator, a nonprofit biotech company focused on completing clinical development of therapies for ultra-rare diseases. In the United States, rare diseases are illnesses that affect 200,000 people or fewer. Only about 5% of rare diseases have FDA-approved therapies. The Orphan Therapeutics Accelerator focuses on the thousands of rare genetic diseases for which a therapy could be sustainably marketed but have failed to attract sufficient interest from traditional investors. I’ve worked in the rare disease field for over ten years and am passionate about serving this community of patients and families.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School: I am the president of the Graduate Healthcare Business Association at Carey, and the managing director of its annual conference. I am also the co-president of Hopkins Biotech Network, which is a student group that’s based out of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine but includes members from across the Hopkins community.

I placed first in a case competition called the iOme Case Competition, which is related to reforming social security, a finance-oriented case. I received the Genentech DEI Award as part of the Nucleate Demo Day. Nucleate is a student accelerator program.

I was involved with case competition teams that received honorable mention at the Kellogg Biotech and Healthcare Case Competition, which included 64 teams. I was also a semi-finalist at the AstraZeneca Case Competition here at Carey.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I am very proud of being voted Best Overall Negotiator by my classmates in a course on integrative negotiations. In this class, we are continuously engaged in small-group structured negotiations. After our negotiations are complete, we review the data of the deals that were struck across the class. I was very flattered because the voting took into consideration negotiation outcomes and how favorably you would look upon negotiating with that person again in the future. I was recognized in terms of both: “She gets good deals, but also, she makes fair and valuable deals.”

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I chose to come to Johns Hopkins because I observed a gap in the landscape in my most recent role when I was at NIH. I became haunted by the realization that even if a clinical trial for an ultra-rare therapy essentially cured the disease, there was still substantial risk that patients wouldn’t be able to access that therapy. That’s because the anticipated profits were not compelling enough for a company to market it. I started thinking about solutions while I was in my role at NIH, but identified I wanted to pursue graduate education in business and public health to be part of launching them. I felt that I needed to enrich myself in the long run anyway, but the timing of my return to school was very much related to my goal to launch an organization that met a certain need.

About a month into my time at Hopkins, I connected with experienced collaborators in my field who wanted to work together to launch the Orphan Therapeutics Accelerator. I’m proud to have identified a gap in helping people with orphan diseases and I’m proud of the perseverance it has required to bring this challenging and ambitious mission into reality.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose Carey Business School because I love innovating in health care and the health care sector. Health care is an inherently interdisciplinary hybrid between private, public, and third-sector operators, and it’s a field unlike any other. If I went to business school anywhere else and got a generic business school education that focused on Nike versus Adidas and Netflix versus Blockbuster, I wouldn’t be able to learn the stories and dynamics that are truly at the heart of the health care field. I chose Carey because the business of health is unlike any other and I wanted to become a master of the business of health.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Professor Dan Polsky was my favorite MBA professor. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Health, and he directs the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative. He was also my mentor in the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative Graduate Academy. He has such a broad command of the unique dynamics at play in different markets. There’s no topic you can name that he doesn’t know the top five tensions. I also learned a lot from him about how to balance humility with expertise. I think he has a phenomenal way of being able to describe the issues in a field while also really remaining aware and transparent about where the unknowns are for him as well as the field.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite course as an MBA student would be Pharmaceutical Strategy with Supriya Munshaw. Professor Munshaw has a phenomenal breadth of experience. She’s worked in biotech, served as a corporate board member, taught in academia, and worked in tech transfer. She is so incisive, and so direct, and is such a strategic thinker. Also, I really appreciate the way that she operates with this amazing combination of optimism and cynicism. Each lecture looked like an Oreo: she helped you understand the payoffs for winners (of intellectual property strategies, regulatory strategies, etc) but bracketed that sweet potential with the hard and dark challenges to getting there.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? My favorite tradition is the Hopkins Healthcare Business Conference, which I helped to organize. The conference celebrates the vibrant and diverse community of health care innovators inside and outside Johns Hopkins University. It’s a fantastic event in which we look at the entire world of the business of health and think about the most exciting themes or emerging trends. We invite leading experts from inside and outside of Hopkins to explore those issues, and it brings together a big cross-section of students and faculty from all of the graduate schools. We have a lot of representation across all the schools and it’s a phenomenal networking opportunity.

What is the biggest myth about your school? (and how was it the same or different than what you experienced) The biggest myth about our Carey Business School is that we are a bunch of science nerds. There’s some truth to that. There are a lot of extremely educated people here, and it is actually a reality of this school that you’ll be chatting about your professional interests over drinks. There’s something liberating about being in that kind of environment, though, if you really are passionate about what you want to do. Why feign nonchalance about the way you want to change the world? Why wouldn’t we be talking about those things?

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I love how down-to-earth Baltimore is. There’s a popular bumper stick here that just reads, “Baltimore: Actually, I like it.” It is a very friendly place. I genuinely like and go out with my neighbors on my block. With regards to the charm of Charm City, it’s extremely beautiful. The architecture and the history are really on every street. My walk to school every day is down brick roads and historical homes, along the Harbor and marinas.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? When I first came to business school, the academic policy around AI was clear. It was “Do not use ChatGPT for anything.” Not as a reference material, not to produce study guides, not to review your draft…nothing. It was a violation of academic integrity. I felt like, “Man, this is an opportunity missed because I know that, in two years, the exercise is going to be how do you use AI to do all of these things better.”

I was very pleased and very lucky to be at Carey while this transformation was taking place. In my second year, I had professors who tasked us with using AI to build product MVPs and professors who actually advocated to the class to use AI to refine or critique your assignments prior to submission. While many classes still have the traditional approach of total avoidance, I’ve seen the academic integrity policies of other classes evolve. Some just require students to disclose how they’ve used AI. Others just warn you that use it at your own risk. Just like the real world, in many contexts, it might help you, it might hurt you, or it might cause you to stagnate. It’s up to you to figure it out. I think there are some merits to approaches that expose us to AI’s powers and limitations, and to push us to figure out how to produce work that is better than what ChatGPT can produce in seconds. The future is here: AI is powerful, user-friendly, and accessible. We each need to figure out where we are going to add value in this new reality.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I chose my classmate Ama Essuman. I really admire her.

There’s this heuristic in psychology called the fundamental attribution error. As a person, as an agent, when something goes wrong in our lives, we attribute it typically to the environment. There is a problem because this outside thing caused that problem. But when we see something go wrong in someone else’s life, we attribute it to the actor. We say, “There is a problem because of some mistake this person made or some flaw they have.” If I swerve, it’s because my kids were being outrageously distracting and the person in front of me braked suddenly. But if they swerve, it’s because they’re a terrible driver. The reason I admire Ama to the moon and back is I think she’s immune to fundamental attribution. I don’t know how but she has this extraordinary ability when there are frustrations with other actors, whether it’s a group project or a professor, she somehow perceives that individual’s environment just as equally as she perceives that actor.

Because she perceives their environment and what is driving them to act the way, she is so much better suited to identifying solutions than 95% of the populace. She doesn’t go to the default hypothesis that there’s a problem with this person. She is taking in information about what is going on around that person, and I think that is a phenomenal talent.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? I would love to run a major association in my field or to be the CEO of one of the trade groups or umbrella organizations or alliances. I have always felt drawn to those kinds of roles because I think the most meaningful problems require collective planning and action.

I would also love to be in Congress or the Senate. I have a deep sense of civic duty and a belief that legislative service is an extremely consequential job. I would be honored to have the ability to have that kind of impact on people’s lives.

Also, and this is the crazy one, I believe in the project of expanding life off the Earth. I believe in the project of establishing redundant planetary colonies for humans as a risk management technique. If we’re terraforming Mars, and the place needs a Health Secretary, I’m applying.

What made Deanna such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2025?

“Deanna sets the standard among our students for devoting her life to saving lives through business solutions. Cures for rare diseases exist, but many never make it to market to save even one life just because of complex market barriers. Deanna is combining her deep institutional knowledge and her inspiring passion with her Carey education to stand-up a new model to overcome current barriers and save lives.”

Daniel Polsky
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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