Kara Whelply is an Associate Director, MI Philanthropy. She works on the Center’s biomedical research team, where she advises individual philanthropists on therapeutic development with methods to identify, fund, and accelerate treatments. Her current portfolio includes advancing the therapeutic development of treatments for bipolar disorder and follicular lymphoma. Prior to joining the Milken Institute, Whelply was an ORISE fellow at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US Food and Drug Administration where she focused on regulatory data and knowledge management systems to improve efficiency and workflow for regulatory reviewers and administrators. Whelply received both a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Public Health with a concentration in epidemiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama. She is based in the Institute’s Washington, DC office.