12 Questions with Lucy Walker
Lucy Walker is the Head of Medical Operations at the growing medical consultancy LUCENT Biopharma. With over 10 years’ experience working across a number of therapy areas and departments, Walker is passionate about ensuring biotech and pharmaceutical organisations, their teams, and processes effectively enable advancements in medicines and healthcare. Watch this space…
What are the main responsibilities of your role? Working for a rapidly growing consultancy means my responsibilities vary daily between client and project delivery, business development, team management, creative thinking, and problem solving. It’s also a joy to also be part of the leadership team – a trusting, challenging and proactive team focused on LUCENT’s growth and people. More specifically within Medical Operations, I am currently focused on our internal definition of this domain and some exciting projects, like launching a new Operations Hub for the industry’s Operations community.
What’s your background prior to this role and how did it prepare you for the work you do now? I started my career in Procurement at Novartis UK – which, looking back, was incredibly valuable in developing my business and operational knowledge base. From there, I held roles in Market Access, Marketing, and Medical. The breadth of experience is essential for Operations: I see the Operations community as the ‘Jack of All Trades’ within the industry, bringing the right people together, with the right information, at the right time to solve problems, make decisions, and execute.
What motivates you about working in pharma? It’s two-fold. Firstly, I’ve had the unfortunate run-in with a long-term health condition and have so much respect and gratitude from this experience for medicines and medical advancements. Secondly, I love working with other passionate people. It’s a privilege to collaborate with individuals that have the drive to do really excellent work, and this industry is full of them!
What are your biggest short-term goals for this year? The Medical Operations domain at LUCENT is booming, which means a huge priority for me is growing the team to match the growing business. Finding exceptional people to join my team and ensuring our project delivery excels are my biggest goals. In addition, as I haven’t yet been in role for a year, I would like to really test the boundaries of Medical Operations (and Operations) within biotech and pharmaceutical organisations and am starting to sow the seeds for scaling the Operations business at LUCENT.
What are your biggest long-term goals for the next five years? Quite simply, my long-term goal at LUCENT and the industry is to raise the recognition and respect for Operations – whether that is Medical, Business, or Commercial operations. I describe Operations as the foundations, walls, and roof of the house (the house, in totality, being the biotech or pharmaceutical organisation). Operations need to be stable, long-standing, and provide safety and confidence to deliver tasks whilst weathering whatever the external environment might throw your way!
What are the most important professional skills in your work and how do you hone them? The most important professional skills for Medical Operations at LUCENT are not necessarily professional skills. They are listening and problem solving. As ‘Operations’ varies hugely between organisations, off-the-shelf solutions are rarely an option and so listening to uncover what the real problem is to enable bespoke and effective problem solving is essential. Commonly, we find our clients describe a problem, but by truly listening we uncover the real problem, which is buried five layers down.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the industry right now? The explosion of innovation (in medicinal products and technology), which is in stark contrast to the ability of industry to adopt these. There is a demand for industry to be quicker, more agile, and more innovative. We commonly hear: ‘Launch medicines faster’, ‘Show results quicker’, ‘Be disruptors’, and I see this translates on the ground to complexity, distractions and, ultimately, lower confidence.
What excites you about the current industry trends? Interestingly, the biggest challenge for the industry is also what excites me the most: new medicines and technology that enables organisations like LUCENT to truly deliver the value that is expected.
If you could change one thing about the pharma industry, what would it be? The perception of pharma. Whilst industry talks about innovative medicines and developments in healthcare and technology, there is still a negative public and health provider perception of pharma. I’d love to see this continue to change for the better.
What are your hobbies? What do you do in your free time? My husband and I moved to the South West around five years ago, and I love being closer to the sea and Dartmoor. I’m passionate about the outdoors, and you’ll commonly find me out running, in the sea, or exploring the Tors. I enjoy planning adventures and visiting other parts of the UK to explore.
What’s the best film or TV show you’ve watched in the last year? I really enjoyed The Housemaid! And as an avid lover of Avatar, I was excited for Avatar 3, but unfortunately I was a little disappointed by the storyline.
If you could have any other job other than the one you have now, what would you choose? I considered the Army Reserves, as the sense of adventure appealed to me! Or something like a Mountain Leader / Mountain Rescue – to get my outdoor fix at work would be amazing.
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