Krista Russell

My journey into healthcare wasn't planned - it came from necessity after I was injured while serving in the Navy. When I could no longer hold my top-secret security clearance, I found myself at an unknown career path, transitioning back from overseas with an injury and illness, facing an uncertain future. A physician I was working with asked if I'd ever thought about clinical research, and honestly, I never had. She referred me to a clinical research investigator, and I started working for her just as a one-off because I needed a job. Twenty-six years later, here I am. I'm now a Global Portfolio Lead for Evanova, which is the digital healthcare organization under AstraZeneca. We're essentially the technology arm of AstraZeneca, working not only internally but also with other pharmaceutical and sponsor companies externally. We do the new things - the cutting-edge work. My responsibility is serving pharmaceutical sponsors in consulting roles for the newest software as a service, and we're doing a lot in the AI space right now for clinical trials. What I'm most proud of throughout my career is being able to translate the needs of my customers and teams from a clinical and patient perspective. There's often an assumption that technology makes things easier, but sometimes it just makes things harder. Most of my job is asking the hard questions: Do we need that? Can we make it simpler? Can we get it down to two clicks? I dig into the weeds and ask technical teams if they're really asking patients with cancer to click 16 times. My goal is to help deliver medications that are desperately needed to patients faster - sometimes it takes 5 or 10 years to get medications to patients who really need them, and if we can understand what's needed and put technology in the right places and gaps, we can speed that up significantly.