Meet The Team


Danya Norton
Managing Principal, Founder

Danya partners with life science and biotech companies to translate strategy, science, and capital into company value. She focuses on rapidly strengthening leadership, execution, and AI-enabled ways of working in fast-paced, complex environments. She helps leadership teams operate with clarity and discipline during key inflection points such as financing, scaling, and strategic shifts. As an embedded partner to CEOs, founders, and investors, she ensures strategy stays tightly connected to execution, quickly identifies breakdowns, and implements practical solutions.

Danya brings a systems-level approach, combining experience building global organizational frameworks at Novartis with operating roles as Chief of Staff and Chief People Officer inside venture-backed biotech. She accelerates alignment and decision-making across executive teams, reducing inefficiencies and improving capital allocation, while bringing AI into HR, operations, and executive workflows to increase capacity without adding overhead. She brings over a decade of executive biotech experience across Merida Biosciences, Avidity Biosciences, Inhibrx, and The Column Group portfolio companies.


Marina Ahn
Coach

Marina brings rigorous scientific training and professional coaching experience to Agate Partners, specializing in guiding biotech organizations through high-impact AI adoption. With a B.S. and M.S. from UC San Diego and firsthand experience as a research scientist in biotech, she understands the complexities of technical environments and scientific cultures.

At Agate Partners, Marina works at the intersection of organizational behavior and technological transformation, helping life science leaders bridge the gap between AI capabilities and human execution. By focusing on leadership alignment, behavioral design, and strategic optimization, she ensures executive mindsets and team workflows evolve alongside new technology — helping teams build AI fluency and become more agile and high-performing.


Our Approach

We believe the most effective partnerships are built on clarity, trust, and a shared commitment to meaningful outcomes — true thought partnership that strengthens alignment, decision-making, and organizational effectiveness, including how AI gets integrated into the way teams operate, collaborate, and make decisions.

Here's what you can expect when you partner with us:

Clear & Direct
We communicate openly and honestly.

Thoughtful & Adaptive
Every organization is different. We don't bring rigid frameworks or pre-packaged solutions — we co-create approaches that reflect your science, your people, and your operating reality.

Deeply Invested
We care about the work and the people doing it. We show up with curiosity, steadiness, and a genuine commitment to helping teams and individuals grow.

Systems-Oriented & Practical
We look at the organization as a whole — leadership behaviors, team dynamics, operating rhythms, and decision pathways — then embed practical solutions that improve how it functions.