Life Sciences Executive Search
About John H. Wang
John H. Wang, Managing Director
John H. Wang is the Managing Director of Sanford Rose Associates - Minneapolis. John brings 30 plus years of strategic and operational life sciences industry experience to the executive search process, 26 years in senior management within start-up and established publicly-traded medical device companies.
Sanford Rose Associates – Minneapolis is a premier executive search firm recruiting mid-level to executive-level professionals within the medical device, diagnostics and biotechnology segments of the global life sciences industry. Founded in 1959, the Sanford Rose Associates organization serves the needs of corporate and institutional clients from over 65 worldwide offices and has made over 100,000 placements.
John’s broad medical device experience allows him to focus on multi-functional recruiting of senior leadership talent for a variety of life science clients. His expertise at building and staffing successful functional organizations and company-wide cross-functional teams allows him to effectively partner with his clients to recruit the right business and technical resources that will make an immediate and sustainable impact on the growth and stability of his client’s business.
John’s successful medical device career began in the late 70’s at St. Jude Medical where he led research and development for over 10 years. During his tenure, he successfully vertically integrated the manufacturing process and globally commercialized the St. Jude Medical heart valve, the world’s first low profile, bi-leaflet mechanical heart valve that went on to be implanted in over 1.5 million patients.
After St. Jude Medical, John held senior executive leadership positions (VP, SVP, GM, CTO) at several major medical device companies such as Baxter Healthcare and CR Bard, as well as, several start-up companies such as Vasca, Spiration, Stereotaxis and CircuLite. During his corporate tenure, John led the development and commercialization of innovative products within diverse clinical specialties including cardiac surgery, cardiovascular, vascular, endovascular, interventional cardiology, interventional radiology, interventional pulmonology, cardiology, nephrology & urology.
John earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD Candidacy in Biomedical Engineering, minor in Physiology, from the University of Minnesota. In addition, John successfully completed extensive training in the executive search process.