Tech Update
OPPORTUNITIES IN PHARMACEUTICALS AND BIOTECHNOLOGY

Pharma & biotech offer exciting work with life-changing products

These rapid-growth industries are noted for their eager acceptance of diversity

By Laura Gater
Contributing Editor

Saunjah Powell-Pointer of Schering-Plough:a Singapore project is the best so far.

Amit Desai works in process control systems and automation for Bayer HealthCare.

Pharmaceuticals and biotech are exciting industries. The chance to be part of the rapid growth of companies and rapid evolution of products makes a compelling career inducement.

So does the industries' eager acceptance of diversity. Pharma and biotech companies prize the new ideas and approaches diversity brings, because they know that they must remain flexible and open to change in order to keep moving ahead.

"We believe that the similarities and differences of employees are a major source of strength," says Yvonne Richardson, VP of project management for hematology and cardiology at Bayer HealthCare. "Diversity fuels our competitive edge by increasing employee retention and satisfaction, improving collaboration and aiding in new product development."

Mel Asbury, senior VP of HR at Talecris Biotherapeutics, reports that his company, too, promotes a culture of inclusion. "We believe that by valuing differences in backgrounds, experiences and beliefs, we can build greater understanding and capitalize on our diversity for continuing success."

Ron Cheeley, senior VP for global HR, notes that "At Schering-Plough, we believe our strength lies in our people. Valuing diversity and inclusion is a business imperative critical to maintaining a competitive advantage in the global marketplace."

A multitude of scientists are involved in biotech and pharma. But there's also plenty of work in these industries for engineers and IT people.

Saunjah Powell-Pointer is a project engineer at Schering-Plough
"I didn't find the pharmaceutical industry; it found me," declares Saunjah Powell-Pointer. She wasn't aware of the opportunities for engineers in pharmaceuticals, but a college friend invited her to a student conference sponsored by Schering-Plough Corp (Kenilworth, NJ). There she met a young engineer who had interned with Schering-Plough and was excited about the experience. So Powell-Pointer was receptive when she met the company's recruiters, and began work there in 2000.

Powell-Pointer grew up in Chicago. She has seven brothers and three sisters. She attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and interned at Lucent Technologies (Naperville, IL) and Caterpillar, Inc (Peoria, IL). She received her BSEE in 1999, and went on to complete an MBA in finance at Rutgers University (Newark, NJ) while working at Schering-Plough.

She started as an assistant project engineer in the global engineering services division, working on fairly small projects like building a storage mezzanine, designing a safety gate and installing emergency power for a lab. In 2002 she was promoted to associate project engineer, and in 2005 she moved up to project engineer. Her responsibilities have expanded to larger scale projects like facility renovations, equipment upgrades and site construction. She also supervises contract people in the design and construction stages of projects.

A year-long assignment in Singapore is the highlight of her career so far. She headed up on-site installation of a filling and packaging production line, managing a cross-functional team of nine people in a fast-track environment. The project was finished on time and 15 percent under budget, she reports with pride.

"Singapore is heavily influenced by the West, which made the transition to an Asian culture easier," Powell-Pointer says. "I learned to listen carefully and be open to the viewpoints of others."

Back in the States, Powell-Pointer is involved in continuous improvement initiatives and in the implementation of a training program for her division. "My goal is to continue to add value for my organization and for Schering-Plough," she declares.

John Hall is an IS director at Amgen

John Hall.

John Hall, associate director of information services at Amgen (Thousand Oaks, CA), knows that IS skills are not bound to any one industry. He has smoothly transferred the know-how he gained in the banking industry to his present job with the biotech giant.

Hall grew up in Brooklyn, NY with his mother, a civil servant, and his sister, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army. He graduated from California State University-Fullerton in 1993 with a degree in psychology and communications. His 1997 MS came from Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA).

Long before graduation, Hall was working in IT as a network control specialist for a bank. It was a night job, backing up the day's financial transactions on huge, legacy mainframes.

"Banks were the primary area for IS jobs back then," Hall says. "After I started working in banking IS I realized that business logic appealed to me and decided that would be my career path."

He moved to San Bernardino, CA as a systems integrator for Network Solutions, Inc. He worked in systems admin and architected new systems.

In 1992 Hall joined Amgen as a data network architect. His projects included adding increased bandwidth to the company's data network system in eight countries as well as all the U.S. locations. He also installed IS infrastructure for building expansion and new construction. The company was going through "incredible growth," he says, and he was given "pretty substantive" opportunities.

In 1996 he became an IS ops manager implementing e-mail system upgrades, phone system changes, new facility IS infrastructure and changes in data network systems. In 2001 he moved up to senior IS manager, responsible for LANs, WANs, voice and phone networking organization-wide.

Hall has been associate director of IS for the last four years. He's responsible for the company's global data centers, conference capabilities and enterprise test lab.

"We are an essential utility for the company," Hall believes. "Biotech and pharmaceutical companies would be almost unworkable without IS. The challenge is getting your task done in line with others, so no productivity time is lost."

Amgen has a rich diversity program, and Hall has observed that the company is fair and equal in relation to performance assessments and job opportunities. There's a lot of tolerance and acceptance of cultural differences, he says.

At Bayer HealthCare, Amit Desai works in process controls

Amit Desai.

"When I was sixteen I learned about DNA transcription and division, and that got me interested in the biotech field," explains Amit Desai, process controls system and automation engineer in the hematology/cardiology unit at Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals (Berkeley, CA).

Desai grew up in a large family in Mumbai, India. His mother was a high school principal and his father a college professor.

Desai graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1995 with a BSChE. He came to the U.S. for his 1997 MSChE from the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA).

Then he went to work for Bayer, designing and implementing process control mechanisms for the software programs that control various processes. Each job requires step-by-step documentation according to FDA regulations.

"I think being a minority can bring different views and novel ideas to the table," Desai reflects. "Bayer celebrates diversity and opens our minds to appreciating all cultures."

Pritesh Shah is a principal engineer at Talecris

Pritesh Shah.

At Talecris Biotherapeutics (formerly Bayer, Research Triangle Park, NC), Pritesh Shah has been a principal engineer for four years.

He grew up in Gujarat, India, with two brothers and an EE father. He attended Regional Engineering College (Rourkela, Orissa, India), receiving a BSChE in 1989.

Shah moved to the U.S. in 1993 to study at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He got his MSChE in 1995. Then he found a job with Mallinckrodt Baker (MBI), which makes high-purity chemicals and chromatography media.

Shah worked for several years as a process engineer for MBI, responsible for a pilot plant and chromatography media manufacturing. In the late 1990s, at the height of the IT boom, he quit MBI to get some additional training in programming. In 1999 he moved to North Carolina for a contract engineering job with Bayer Corp. He liked the pharmaceutical industry and the lifestyle in North Carolina, and was happy to accept a permanent job as a senior engineer after four months.

He was promoted to principal engineer in 2002. Right now he's a lead process engineer for a large capital project, working with a contract engineering company to ensure that the new equipment is optimally designed and appropriately scaled. "A ChE degree can lead in many directions once you have worked in pharmaceuticals for a while," he says.

Shah, who is married with two daughters, has seen very little discrimination in the South and none at all at Bayer/Talecris, which has a very diverse workforce. He enjoys his work and his co-workers, and hopes to stay with Talecris and advance to a management job.

Monique Heiser is a compliance VP at Covance

Monique Heiser.

Monique Heiser is VP of business process improvement and compliance at Covance Laboratories, Inc, a contract research organization that performs drug development services for pharma and biotech companies. Covance has ops in twenty countries and some forty offices and 8,000 employees worldwide.

Heiser's current VP position is a long way from her start as a lab tech in rodent toxicology, her first job with Covance twenty-three years ago.

She graduated from the Madison Area Technical College (Madison, WI) in 1983 with an associate degree as a veterinary technician. She began as a lab tech at Covance, and in the next ten years moved to senior tech, group leader and manager of toxicology ops.

In 1995 she completed a BS in business at Edgewood College (Madison, WI), and became associate director of toxicology ops the next year. She went on to director of toxicology ops in North America and then business process improvement leader: a Six Sigma expert working on business-wide projects. She's proud of the honor she received in 1990, when she was named Southern Wisconsin supervisor of the year by the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science.

In 2005 she was appointed director of the QA unit and in 2006 she reached her present post. As VP of business process improvement and compliance she directs the deployment of Six Sigma across Covance Labs North America, as well as compliance activities relating to good lab test processes, strategic planning and more. The work requires knowledge of scientific testing processes and procedures, so her background serves her well.

In her career Heiser has attended hundreds of training programs in many areas, she says. She's a founder of the women's networking group at the Madison location. "Good ideas have always been welcomed and supported by management here," she notes.

D/C

Laura Gater is a freelance business and medical/ healthcare writer based in northeast Indiana.

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