Senior Director, Seasonal Vaccines

Role Summary

You will help set scientific strategy for a seasonal viral vaccine program based on extensive industry and basic scientific experience in virology, synthetic biology, immunology, and vaccinology. You will provide scientific leadership to a diverse research team, communicate with external stakeholders and collaborators to advance our programs, and demonstrate deep, institutional working knowledge of seasonal vaccine updates and pandemic response systems. This is a hybrid role requiring you to live within commuting distance and work on-site an average of 2.5 days per week.

Responsibilities

• Support and enhance the current infrastructure and processes required to enable robust and rapid development and licensure of variant-adapted COVID-19 vaccines.
• Represent Research on the cross-functional Vaccine Product Team, operating at the interface between research and development and coordinating with non-research functions to meet program goals, including life cycle management.
• Establish relationships with and serve as a primary scientific liaison with external alliance partners, including collaborating companies, government agencies and non-governmental organizations
• Actively manage project risks, devising and implementing appropriate mitigation activities with multidisciplinary teams. Lead timely and effective communication of project risks and impact to senior leaders.
• Ensures that intellectual property is appropriately obtained and safeguarded.
• Take a key role in communication about vaccine programs in internal Pfizer documents and external patent applications, regulatory submissions, scientific papers, and conferences.
• Leads a motivated, committed and engaged research team to provide preclinical data to support annual strain change activities as well as exploration of next-generation vaccine technologies, leading direct reports and non-reports, reviewing experimental designs and data.

Qualifications

• PhD in Virology or a related field
• 10+ years industry or biotech experience in pre-clinical research and in vaccine technical development, with basic scientific expertise in SARS-CoV-2 research, immunology, serology, RNA vaccine technologies, and synthetic virology. Experience in research agencies such as NIH or CDC will also be considered.
• Practical knowledge of global SAR-CoV-2 surveillance, recommendation, and regulatory systems
• Experience providing scientific leadership for projects in the pharmaceutical industry, and proven track record of project advancement and delivery in vaccines
• Global scientific reputation as evidenced by publication record and interaction with NIH or other established government research agencies.
• Understanding the scientific and non-scientific aspects of vaccines, and viral vaccine scientific, clinical and competitive landscape
• Demonstrated innovation and experience to applying knowledge, techniques and skills to identify and validate best new technologies.
• Strong communication skills including public speaking experience and scientific writing
• Experience collaborating cross functionally
• Scientific analysis experience
• Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

Additional Requirements

• Must be able to work over weekends or at night to respond to urgent business matters
• Must be able to travel to vaccine-related meetings and conferences