Jenn Garofolo

Jenn Garofolo, MPH, MBA, has spent more than twenty years leading U.S. commercialization and market access across rare disease, oncology, hematology, and gene therapy at companies including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson. Her work has centered on a single question: can patients actually access the innovation we develop? Most recently, she led U.S. market access strategy for the first CRISPR-based gene therapy approved for sickle cell disease, a community long underserved by the systems built to treat it.

She built her career understanding how systems work, how treatments get developed, approved, reimbursed, and delivered. For most of those years, she was also fighting on behalf of her own child.

Fighting for Their Lives is the memoir she wrote from inside that fight. It traces more than a decade of psychiatric institutions, school systems, and insurance denials, of standing with her oldest child as he came out as transgender, and of the particular exhaustion of being the person in the room who understands exactly how broken the process is and still cannot fix it. It is a book about resilience, advocacy, and what parents do when the answer they need does not exist yet.

Long before any of this, Jenn was a Division I basketball player. The court taught her how to pivot, how to lose without losing herself, and how to move a team forward when the game gets hard. She is still doing all of those things, just on a different court.

Jenn holds a BS in Psychology from Brown University, a Master of Public Health from Rutgers, and an Executive MBA from Rutgers Business School. She is a mental health and LGBTQIA+ advocate, a sought-after voice on resilience and caregiver experience, and serves on the boards of the Boston Gay Men's Chorus and the Brown University Sports Foundation. She lives in the Greater Boston area.