Ajay Dhankhar
Senior Advisor
Ajay Dhankhar is a Senior Advisor in the Healthcare Group based in New York.
Previously, he was the global coleader of McKinsey’s M&A, strategy, finance, and risk work for the Life Sciences Practice and the global co-leader of McKinsey’s R&D practice.
Ajay has helped deliver more than 50 major transactions, including one of the top-five largest restructurings in the financial industry, and four of the top 10 in healthcare. He has extensive experience in corporate and business-unit strategy, portfolio transformations including divestments, capital management, activist investor responses, enterprise risk, and large-scale post-merger integrations.
He has been the overall client service leader for multiple healthcare and other sector companies across North America, Europe, and Asia. He is a thought leader on M&A and strategy and regularly publishes in leading journals.
Within Medical Devices, Diagnostics, and Tools, Ajay has executed M&A in and conducted numerous strategic assessments of the segments where value will be created including Surgery, Robotics, NGS, Liquid Biopsy implications, Advanced Wound Care, Orthopedics, Imaging and Diabetes, to name a few. He has also worked with 10+ PE companies on asset assessments within medical devices/diagnostics/tools/HCIT, including carve-outs from strategics to PE.
Ajay is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences including AdvaMed, PhRMA and others, He has numerous publications in journals such as McKinsey digital, Nature Reviews, Journal of Neurophysiology, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others.
Outside of work, Ajay enjoys golf (5 handicap), skiing with his family and friends and serving on the boards of several not-for-profit institutions, including The Antara Foundation, Newark Academy, and the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association.
Ajay holds a Ph.D. and an MPhil in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University where he was a University Fellow, and a B.S. in Physics and Computer Science from Angelo State University where he was a Presidential Award winner.
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