Fingerpaint Group, a top-20 health care agency and leading commercialization platform for the life sciences, announced the appointment of Sarah Cherng, as its new chief technology & product officer.
Cherng will report directly to Fingerpaint Group CEO Bill McEllen. She steps into the role with more than two decades of enterprise data science and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) leadership experience spanning the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and consumer sectors.
Her appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the award-winning agency—recently named the 2026 Med Ad News Network of the Year—as it continues to scale its “human-led, AI-enabled” approach to health care marketing and commercialization.
Cherng joins Fingerpaint Group following a string of high-impact leadership roles at major enterprise organizations:
- Aura: As Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, she guided the engineering and AI division through a successful liquidity event, constructing a centralized platform that integrated ML, large language models (LLMs), and agentic frameworks directly into customer-facing products.
- The Estée Lauder Companies: As head of the Data Science and Advanced Analytics team, Cherng delivered more than $200 million in business value by building an enterprise data platform and driving macro-level technology reorganizations.
- Merck: She directed Global Oncology Data and Analytics, supporting a massive $16 billion-plus global oncology portfolio.
- Flatiron Health: She led a multidisciplinary team of ML engineers, biostatisticians, and quantitative scientists focused on critical cancer endpoint research for life sciences partners.
“She translates complex data science and AI into tangible business value and has a proven track record of scaling high-performing organizations,” Bill McEllen, CEO of Fingerpaint Group said. “Sarah is exactly the leader to help us push our work further.”
In her new role, Cherng is tasked with shaping Fingerpaint’s overarching technology and AI strategy, modernizing its data infrastructure, and guiding global pharmaceutical clients through the complexities of modern digital transformation.
Cherng noted that the evolution of productized LLMs presents a massive opportunity to solve long-standing data fragmentation within the health care sector.
“Data in the life sciences industry has been historically siloed,” Cherng said. “While traditional models have been around for years, the introduction and steady improvement of productized LLMs finally gives us the power to unify that data and enable accessibility that can unlock deeper contextual insights to benefit patients.”
She emphasized that Fingerpaint’s established industry trust and scientific integrity make it uniquely positioned to scale these technologies responsibly. “The opportunity to build a unified and compounding commercialization platform here is particularly unique.”
