Leavey School Alumna Built Path from Ukrainian Immigrant to Biotech Executive
A Louis Vuitton boutique in Bermuda is about as far from a research lab as you can get. Yet that’s exactly where Oksana Komarova stood, running a luxury storefront and selling $3,000 handbags to tourists. Only a few years earlier, she had been pipetting samples in an Oregon hematology–oncology lab, convinced her future was in medicine.
“I loved science and I loved my team,” she recalls. “But after three or four years, I realized I just didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a lab.”
That realization launched a career path that would zigzag from Portland to Manhattan to Bermuda and finally to South San Francisco—where she now leads major drug launches at Genentech. Her third launch, happening right now, involves what she calls "a portfolio doublet"—two medicines combined in the hematology space.
Her path looks nonlinear on paper, but the throughline becomes clear as she tells it: curiosity, reinvention, and an instinct for stepping toward what feels meaningful.
A Career That Keeps Evolving
Born in Ukraine, Komarova arrived in the United States as a high school student in the early 1990s. Rigorously educated, she jumped into advanced classes and soon found herself conducting research at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) while still a teenager.
After deciding not to pursue medicine, she moved to New York, enrolled at Barnard College at Columbia University, and shifted her focus to economics. A pivot to luxury retail followed, first in Bermuda, then in Soho, and later back in Kiev, where she helped open Louis Vuitton’s first flagship location in the city.
She thrived in the work—until becoming a parent reframed what she wanted next.
"Having kids made me rethink the purpose in life," she explains. "Where I was putting my time and energy." Fashion was exciting, creative, and fulfilling. But was it enough?
Around the same time, a New York branding agency approached her for help attracting luxury clients. The work got her thinking. Drug discovery had exploded since she'd left the lab — new technologies, new modalities, entirely new classes of medicines. “I realized I’d played a small role in that change, and that felt really meaningful.”
So she moved her family to the Bay Area, now a global center for biotech innovation. Following a stint at a gene therapy startup, she joined Genentech on the global portfolio strategy team, which reported to the Chief Medical Officer. Her team supported high-stakes decisions for late-stage drug development—billion-dollar choices about which medicines to advance, which to pause, and how to position them for maximum impact.
The work was energizing, but she found herself wanting to understand how those early strategic decisions played out in the real world. That desire led her to transition to the commercial side of the organization, where she continues to work today.
Returning to the Classroom
Midway through her time at Genentech, Komarova reached a point of reflection. She was feeling stuck, not professionally, but personally.
“I wanted to grow as a leader,” she says.
She considered several executive MBA programs before ultimately choosing Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business. “As far as quality of education goes, and as far as price goes, and what you get out of it, I think it’s pretty unbeatable value.”
But it wasn't just about ROI calculations. The small class sizes and tight-knit cohort reminded her of her undergraduate experience—collaborative, engaged, and supportive. “Having that environment to really practice and hone skills, to have support—that was instrumental to my growth.”
Lessons That Stayed With Her
“When I think about what really stayed with me, it’s the organizational management and negotiations courses with Professor Posner; innovation and change management with Professor Madsen; and the leadership and entrepreneurship classes,” she says.
She already knew how to build valuations and long-range strategy—that was part of her day-to-day work. What she needed were frameworks for leading through uncertainty and motivating people across large, cross-functional teams, even without direct authority.
“We are, by definition, an industry of change,” she notes. “As a leader, when I don’t necessarily have direct reports, I really need to motivate people and lead them toward a big goal. Often the path is unclear.”
A standout moment came during the program’s capstone: a week in Germany meeting entrepreneurs and solving real business problems together. “There’s nothing quite like iteration of solutioning with real-life feedback,” she says. “Doing it in this gorgeous different environment, that definitely sticks with me.”
The Intersection of Tech and Biotech
Studying in Silicon Valley also exposed Komarova to a different way of thinking about innovation. Biotech operates on decade-long timelines and billion-dollar development cycles. Tech, by contrast, launches minimum viable products in months and iterates constantly, embracing a “move fast and break things” mindset.
“If I were to come up with two industries that have the most polar opposite ways of thinking about product development,” she laughs, “it’s tech and biotechnology.”
Yet she sees opportunity in that contrast. Health tech has historically solved problems step by step—what she calls “A to B solutions.” But with advances in AI, she sees potential for more integrated, “big picture” approaches to drug discovery and commercialization.
“We need to have that mindset of how we make technology work for healthcare and drug discovery,” she says. “Because it’s not going to work the other way around.”
A Surprising Source of Support
One aspect of Santa Clara that surprised her most was the level of care and logistical support built into the Executive MBA experience.
“Coming from undergrad where you sink or swim, I felt like there was so much more support,” she reflects. Staff routinely anticipated students’ needs before they voiced them. For a working professional balancing career, family, and leadership growth, that high-touch environment made a meaningful difference.
What Comes Next
Today, Komarova is drawn to opportunities where she can “bring more of the totality of my experience to the table.” Places that blend deep drug development expertise with tech innovation—places where someone who has run luxury boutiques and launched cancer drugs might spot connections others miss.
The Ukrainian teenager who once stood at a lab bench in Portland has traveled a long way—to Manhattan boutiques, Bermuda storefronts, biotech boardrooms, and weekend MBA classrooms. Each pivot felt unrelated at the time. Looking back, they chart a clear pattern: someone willing to leave comfort zones, rethink assumptions, and keep learning more than three decades into her career.