Transcript

[00:00:00] Alexander: Welcome to a new episode of The Effective Statistician, and today I'm super excited to talk with Sheila about her project that I think is a really important part in the overall puzzle of developing new medicines, new diagnostics, and all kind of other things in our world of healthcare. Welcome to the show, Sheila.
[00:00:30] Sheila: Thanks Alexander. So happy to be here and thank you for the kind words of intro.
[00:00:35] Alexander: Yeah. Maybe for those who don't know you, you can shortly introduce yourself and what you brought into LifeSciHub.
[00:00:44] Sheila: Sure. I'm Sheila Mahoney-Jewels, I've been in pharmaceutical research and development for nearly 25 years. I originally started in regulatory operations on the sponsor side. I moved over to the vendor side. [00:01:00] In 2014, I became an independent consultant. I have been I've evolved beyond regulatory. I'm now a, I consider myself a cross functionalist, having worked directly in projects in almost every domain area of expertise.
Not the lab bench and not the sales force of a pharmaceutical company, but almost everything in between. And I am now focused. In addition to continuing to be an independent consultant myself, directly working on r and d projects, I've created LifeSciHub, which is a new approach to finding non fulltime employee talent.
[00:01:45] Alexander: Yeah. And we'll get into this now with this episode today. I hear so many kind of people talking, oh, it's so hard to find talented people. It's so hard to find [00:02:00] experts. Do you agree with that kind of proposition?
[00:02:04] Sheila: Yes and no. I see an abundance of talent in the LifeSciHub community and network in terms of there are many independent small business of one experts. On the drug sponsor side, I do hear a lot of challenges in finding talent that, as a matter of fact, it's I've been surprised investors that I've spoken to have said that talent, they're very interested in any solutions that are addressing r and d talent. Because access to talent is actually a significant risk to their portfolio companies.
So they've invested in these small biotechs and they are seeing the struggles and the, I'm hearing this from more than one investor. They've actually reached out to LifeSciHub because they're actively seeking talent solutions. So yeah, I think [00:03:00] it's real.
[00:03:01] Alexander: Yeah. Yeah. And these interesting discrepancy. On the one hand you have companies that struggle to get really high quality experts. We are not talking about the people that, come fresh out of university but people that have a deep expertise that are fundamental to the success of smaller companies but also bigger companies.
And on the other hand, we have these. Individuals or these peoples that work, let's say in small companies, let's say they just have a partner or it's a, the three of them, they have formed a new company. Lots of these. So the question is, first for me, why do these, very talented people? Why don't they go for working for big company? Why don't say hire sponsor one of these, big full service providers. I would [00:04:00] say, why don't say Itk?
[00:04:02] Sheila: Could you repeat the question? I apologize.
[00:04:04] Alexander: So why do these very talented individuals, these people, with a deep expertise in their area of specialty, Why don't they work for a big pharma company or a big full service provider?
[00:04:22] Sheila: Ah, I see. So in other words, why are they independent? Instead of working full-time or working for a large pharma. There's a few different reasons. Work-life balance. As a matter of fact, LifeSciHub has conducted a number of studies on this population and or a new talent pool, quote unquote as it could be called very gig economy talent. And work-life balance and flexibility, choice of projects, all of these things come up an awful lot. There's a really great story that really speaks to, I think, a primary reason why