Leadership Learnings from the Collaboration that Delivered a COVID Vaccine in Record Time

Steve Cutler, PhD, MBA was appointed Chief Executive Officer of ICON plc on 1 st March, 2017 and serves on ICON’s Board of Directors. Dr Cutler joined ICON in 2011 as Group President, Clinical Research Services, and after leading this business to significant growth, was appointed Chief Operating Officer in January 2014, leading ICON’s global operations, strategic customer alliances and the management of clinical development projects from Phase IIb – IV.Dr Cutler has over 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and CRO industries. Prior to joining ICON, Dr Cutler was Chief Executive Officer of Kendle. Prior to Kendle, Dr Cutler spent 14 years with Quintiles where he served as Senior Vice President, Global Project Management; Senior Vice President, Clinical, Medical and Regulatory; Senior Vice President, Project Management – Europe; and Vice President, Oncology – Europe as well as regional leadership positions in South Africa and Australia. Prior to joining Quintiles, Dr. Cutler held positions with Sandoz (now Novartis) in Australia and Europe.Dr Cutler was nominated to the PharmaVOICE Most Inspiring People in R&D in 2011. He also represented Australia in Rugby Union from 1982 – 1991 playing 40 international matches. Dr Cutler holds a BSc and a PhD from the University of Sydney and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Birmingham (UK).

Rob Goodwin is Vice President and Head of the Pfizer Global Product Development Operations Center of Excellence, a discipline dedicated to servicing operational activities across Pfizer.   In this role he is responsible for Standard Operating Procedures, Training, Contracting, Business Continuity Management, and Information Management across the development continuum for Clinical, Safety and Regulatory.  In addition, he holds the executive relationships with the preferred Contract Research Organizations (CROs) as well as the analytics generation for reporting on performance metrics and cycle times across clinical studies.  Mr Goodwin also has responsibilities for leading the advancement of clinical innovation. From 2010 to 2015, Mr Goodwin  served as the Vice President of Safety Evaluation and Reporting in Worldwide Safety and Regulatory where he was responsible for global Pharmacovigilance including Safety Case Processing, Medical Review, Safety Aggregate Reporting as well as Medical Authoring.  Prior to that, he was Vice President of Operational Excellence and Business Innovation for Safety, Regulatory and Medical responsible for Pharmacovigilance Agreements, Contracts and Outsourcing, Project Management, Continuous Improvement, Metrics Reporting, and Safety and Regulatory Innovation.  From 2005 to 2010, Mr Goodwin was the Vice President and World-Wide Head of Global Clinical Data Services.  Mr Goodwin has over 27 years of industry experience in statistics, SAS programming, data management, Electronic Data Capture (EDC), safety and strategic project management. Mr Goodwin has led the EDC initiative at Pfizer and was recognized in 2002 with a Pfizer Presidents achievement and later in 2005 for his work for Process Harmonization and Optimization across Development Operations and Clinical.  In February 2004, Mr Goodwin was recognized in CIO Magazine as the Healthcare Industry winner for the Pfizer implementation of EDC.  Mr Goodwin is an executive Six Sigma Black Belt and has been a past member of PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), past board member for CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium).   He is a current member of the Transcelerate operations board and a member of the Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM) advisory board and a co-chair for the Vulcan HL7/Transcelerate research accelerator. Mr Goodwin holds a BS in Psychology from Eastern Connecticut State University, a MS in Research, Measurement and Evaluation from Southern Connecticut State University and an MBA in Pharmaceutical and Chemical Studies.