The Arizona Bioindustry Association (AZBio) will present its Jon W. McGarity Arizona Bioscience Leader of the Year award to Mara Aspinall to honor her global leadership in biomedical diagnostics and recognize her role as an active leader in Arizona’s science community.

Aspinall is president and CEO of HealthCatalysts, an investment firm that helps new health care companies.

A ceremony honoring Aspinall will take place at the AZBio Awards on Sept. 21 at the Phoenix Convention Center. The AZBio Awards celebration honors the state's leading educators, innovators and companies.

“Great leaders are able to bring people together to pursue a common goal and help them to achieve it,” Joan Koerber-Walker, president and CEO of AZBio, said. “Biomedical diagnostics are some of the least understood and most undervalued resources we have in our health care tool kit. Mara Aspinall is on a mission to change that. Most importantly, she does more than just talk about it. She is taking action and making a positive impact.”

Aspinall is also executive chairperson of GenePeeks, a computational genomics company whose proprietary technology can identify the risk of passing on disease to progeny pre-conception via exploring data from maternal and paternal genomes.

She is also on the board of directors of Safeguard Scientifics, Abcam plc, Blue Cross Blue Shield Arizona, Castle Biosciences and the Arizona Bioindustry Association.

Aspinall co-founded the International School of Biomedical Diagnostics at Arizona State University, the first school dedicated entirely to diagnostics.

“Diagnostics are the glue that should hold the health care system together,” Aspinall said. “Patients have nothing without an accurate and timely diagnosis. One hundred years ago, medicine had few effective therapies but focused on diagnosis. Today we have more advanced therapies but don’t focus enough on the specific diagnosis. Change is just beginning.”