Ever since his time at Vanderbilt, Roger Kumar’s career has mostly centered on health care.

While in the Vanderbilt MS Finance program, he served as an equity research intern for Nashville-based Avondale Partners’ medical devices team.

After graduation, Roger spent three years with Goldman Sachs, working as an analyst on the biotech and small-cap pharma teams.

Then, in 2014, he joined Capital Group in New York City as a research associate on the buy side, helping portfolio managers and investment analysts make investment decisions.

Late in 2016, Roger’s career took a big jump when he joined Cota, a health care technology startup, as Business & Strategy Manager. “I work with executive leadership to manage financial planning and analysis, internal and external strategy and operations,” he explains. “I lead the company’s fundraising activities and am involved in defining strategy and methodology and in setting company-wide goals.”

For Roger, who enjoys running in Central Park and elsewhere in the city, the move to Cota changed the focus of his work while keeping him squarely within the health care field—and while enabling him, he says, to fully apply “the analytical toolkit I developed from the rigorous coursework” at Vanderbilt.

“When I completed my degree,” Roger explains, “I was focused on leveraging my interest in the market into a role in investment research. Having accomplished that, I realized that my interest in the market stemmed from a deeper passion for understanding how corporate strategy can lead to companies outperforming expectations.

“I have been able to apply the investor’s perspective I gained on Wall Street to my role at Cota, allowing me to operationalize strategies and grow and build the company. I hope to continue to develop this perspective and, perhaps, someday run a company of my own."

“I have been able to apply the investor’s perspective I gained on Wall Street to operationalize strategies and grow and build the company.”