Karen Sterling

Dr. Karen Sterling is a Managing Director at Avalon Group Ltd.
She joined Avalon in April 2009 as Managing Director of Healthcare Investment Banking.
She provides strategic advisory and fundraising services to small- and micro-cap companies in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical devices sectors.
Prior to joining Avalon, Ms. Sterling held the position of principal at Karen Sterling Bio-Pharma Insight (“Insight”), her own independent consulting firm, founded to provide clients with scientific due diligence and equity research on both public and private biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
As part of its service, Insight maintained coverage of a portfolio of biotechnology companies developing cancer therapeutics, monoclonal antibodies, and life sciences productivity tools.
Insight also performed competitive analyses through blind independent testing of biotechnology tools, evaluation of the innovation and application potential of various biotechnology platforms, as well as valuation of product pipelines.
Dr. Sterling also worked as a fundamental and quantitative analyst at FridsonVision, a high yield research firm, where she contributed to the firm's research publications, Leverage World and Distressed Debt Investor, developing the weekly Security Selection, Sector Allocation and Market Timing sections of Leverage World and providing quantitative analysis underlying Martin Fridson’s and her own Big Picture articles for both publications.
At FridsonVision, she managed and was principal researcher of a proprietary risk management study commissioned by a global financial institution.
She received her doctorate degree from Columbia University.