Dr. Sammut is Adjunct Associate Professor of Management/Entrepreneurship and Senior Fellow Health Care Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The thrust of Dr. Sammut’s private sector and academic activity is finding ways that private capital – private equity and venture capital – can accelerate international development and global health.

During his 33 years teaching at Wharton and other business schools in India, Israel, Kenya, Portugal, and Russia, he has created over 14 courses that he has taught to over 14,000 students. These courses include Venture Capital and Entrepreneurial Management; Private Equity in Emerging Markets; Strategic Management of Intellectual Property; Comparative Health Care Services Systems (India and African venues), Health Care Entrepreneurship; and the Role of the Private Sector in Global Health among others. His research focuses on international development, health care and biotechnology capacity building in emerging economies, as well as adoption of precision medicine. His current research focuses on the impact of the transition for developing countries from Low-Income status to Middle-Income status on health systems. He has published articles in Nature Biotechnology, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology and has authored numerous book chapters on health care and biotechnology in the US, India, and China. Dr. Sammut puts his research findings into practice through the International Institute for Biotechnology Entrepreneurship, an organization which he founded and manages, that has offered over 60 intensive training programs in 14 countries to nearly 3000 entrepreneurs.

Dr. Sammut also serves as an Operating Partner and Chair, Advisory Board of Alta Semper Capital, a private equity impact fund focused entirely on health care investing in Africa. The firm has invested extensively in pharmaceutical access through innovative pharmacy structures and comprehensive cancer care. In his private sector work he has founded, managed, or financed over 50 companies in life sciences and IT globally. Over the last several decades he has been a partner or adviser to numerous health care and impact-oriented venture capital and private equity firms internationally and has also founded health care management MBA programs in India and throughout Africa.

He is visiting faculty and served as a founder of the Indian School of Business healthcare program and is Visiting Associate Professor at the Strathmore University Business School in Nairobi where he founded the first Healthcare Management MBA program on the African continent, as well as founding the African Institute for Healthcare Management, an organization focused on developing faculty and teaching materials to advance health services. He is currently co-developing a School of Global Public Health at Strathmore University in partnership with NYU, as well as assisting with health care management MBA programs at the Lagos Business School and the KNUST School of Business in Ghana. His board memberships have included Investors 4 Health, the Catholic Medical Mission Board, Doctors of the World - USA, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, BioEthics International, Pandorum Technologies, the Africa Health Fund, Alta Semper, the Russian Foundation for Cancer Research and numerous other profit and non-profit organizations in the US and the emerging markets.

Dr. Sammut was a Venture Partner at Burrill & Company, a biotechnology and health care venture fund, where he focused on the development of international venture funds, from 2000 to 2008. He has consulted for the IFC/World Bank on PE/VC, technology transfer and program assessment, and investments in Fintech for economic development. Similarly, he has advised the governments of Brazil, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan among others in the development of policies to promote venture financing of their biotechnology industries.

Earlier in his career he had venture capital roles as Partner, Access Partners, a fund focused on biotechnology company formation based on university technologies. While in that role, he served on the technology boards of Partners in Healthcare (Harvard, MGH, Brigham & Women’s Hospital), the Cornell Research Foundation, Dartmouth University, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the University of North Carolina, University of Chicago School of Medicine and the University of California system technology transfer program. He was also VP, SR One, the venture capital arm of GSK, and VP for Development and Private Equity at Teleflex Incorporated where he played a role on the transformation of the parent company to a major supplier of medical products. He has also been Founder and Managing Director of Technology Transfer (now the Pennovation Center) at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of technology transfer at Thomas Jefferson University. He began his career as co- founder and CEO of the Philadelphia transplant organ bank—the Gift of Life Program—the largest in the United States, a clinical organization that he managed for nine years.

He holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from Villanova University, an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and engaged in special studies in medicine and epidemiology at Hahnemann Medical college for two years. He holds a doctorate from the Fox School of Business at Temple University where his dissertation research focused on organizational aspects of precision medicine implementation. He is currently engaged in post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge on the relationship of economic development and health care in emerging and frontier markets. He holds certificates in implementation science from the WHO, precision medicine from Harvard, fintech from Oxford, global health innovation from IESE and quantum computing from MIT. He is a Knight of Malta through which he is engaged in maternal-child care hospital development in Kenya and management of Hansen’s Disease in Somalia.