Snigdha Rai

I have been in my field for over 18 years, and I started my journey at GlaxoSmithKline as an engineer on the floor doing the manufacturing. At that time, GlaxoSmithKline was doing manufacturing for a partnership that had a commercial product, so I was fairly new out of college and on the floor helping to manufacture products that were going to people in the world. While I was working, GlaxoSmithKline gave me the opportunity to go get my master's degree while working. I was working a 40-hour work week, and then on top of that, I was going to school to get my master's degree, and that was the catapult for me moving up the ladder in my career. I'm very grateful for GlaxoSmithKline to give me the opportunity to be able to get more education as well as experience to be able to move up. I also worked at Merck, where I continued to develop my skills. Now, as the Senior Director of Biomanufacturing at Mayo Clinic, we focus on cell therapy manufacturing for clinical phase 1 and 2 products. We partner with medical doctors at Mayo Clinic who have their drugs in discovery phase, and we help develop the process for their drugs to be implemented to the patients. We help them with the process development, perform all kinds of testing on it to ensure that the product is being made for what it's intended for, and then we actually manufacture it. Once we manufacture it, that product actually goes to the patients who are enrolled in the clinical trials at Mayo.