Women in Biopharma

Dr. Shae Taylor entered Virginia Commonwealth University in the Fall of 1990 as an evening student to attend college classes, with special permission from the university president, after attending high school. She graduated high school in the spring of 1991 and began taking classes full time at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Fall of 1991 as a biology major. She graduated with a B.S. in Biology in 1995 but found it difficult to get a job with a biology degree at that time. She began taking the last few classes she needed to complete her chemistry degree, and, in the spring of 1997, she graduated with her B.S. in Chemistry. While she was working on her chemistry degree, she began working as an analytical chemist. It was great experience, but she quickly became bored with the work she was doing. She began working on her next degree but did not want it to be a science degree as those with a masters in the sciences frequently were overlooked for positions. Most employers at the time viewed someone with a masters in a science field as overqualified for those positions requiring a bachelor's degree and underqualified for those requiring a doctoral degree. There just wasn't a lot of opportunities for someone with a masters. Not sure what to do, she began taking business classes where she soon realized that she really enjoyed her marketing classes. She joined Agilent Technologies in 2000 as a field service engineer specializing in liquid chromatography and regulated industries. At that time, only 3% of Agilent's field service engineers were women in the United States and that number dropped significantly outside of the United States. In 2004, she graduated from the University of Richmond with a Master's in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing. In 2007, she received an internal email asking if she would be interested in joining the Agilent delegation to attend the annual Society of Women Engineers (SWE) conference. She had not heard about SWE up to that point but was excited about the prospect of meeting other women in her field. That first conference inspired her in ways she never imagined and over the years, she has become very involved in SWE, attending annual conferences, participating in career fairs and outreach programs that encourage young women to pursue science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers and ultimately becoming the lead of the SWE@Agilent Employee Network Group. This employee network group was the first employee network group at Agilent and for years remained the only woman-focused employee network group at Agilent. That group has steadily grown and, in addition to participating in the annual SWE national conferences, now has a full complement of activities to offer employees at Agilent including a quarterly webinar series, a book club, in-person and virtual networking and learning opportunities, outreach activities and more. After advancing to the highest level she could within Agilent as a field service engineer, Shae transitioned over to the product technical marketing team in 2013 for multivendor, relocation and inventory management services. In 2018, she took the role of marketing program manager for North America covering liquid phase products, software and informatics, and the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical market segments. She is a lifelong learner and in 2019 she graduated from Temple University with a doctorate in Business Administration and as a member of the Beta Gamma Sigma Honors Society. Shae loves to problem solve. Even as a child, she was drawn to puzzles, cryptograms, and other logic and math-based games. She is passionate about giving back to the world around her. She volunteers with the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Red Cross, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Atlee Church, just to name a few. She also serves on the Executive Review Board for the Responsible Research in Management Award Progr

Introduction.- What is Biopharma? Weaving the Web with Pandora's Box: Riding the Wave of a Paradigm Shift in Biopharmaceuticals.- Different Career Paths in the Biopharma Industry: Exploring Marketing and Product Management.- The Biopharma Industry Around the World: The Biopharma Industry in India.