Niranjan Kumar, MS, PhD, EMTM’04

Leveraging Science, Business and Cultural Insights

Communicating effectively across cultural barriers among executives, senior scientists, internal and external regulators and businesspeople comes naturally to Niranjan Kumar, a senior scientist and project leader at Sanofi-Aventis.

As the point person for FDA compliance on "method validation" for Sanofi-Aventis's U.S.-licensed products, Kumar routinely leads teams in industrial and quality operations, research and development, and manufacturing successfully through a maze of scientific, manufacturing, managerial and regulatory challenges.

Kumar turned to Penn's EMTM program in the fall of 2001 when he realized that to advance his career further, he needed to master the analytic tools used by corporate finance types.

"All too often, people with finance and accounting expertise are the ones who at the end of the day tell the scientists and managers whether a project can be funded or not," Kumar says. "Now I can present the science and technology in the right way to justify how it should be funded; and I can defend the resources I'm asking for by explaining the return on investment, and by using financial and scenario options models. It's critical to integrate science and technology with strong managerial and financial principals."

Niranjan Kumar's EMTM training and participation in EMTM's Global Immersion Trip to China has also put him in a position to leverage his cultural sensitivities as a native of India and U.S. citizen. With sponsorship, in part, from EMTM, Kumar helped to organize a "Global Bio-Pharma Conference" in India that focused on emerging issues, challenges and opportunities in the globalization of the pharmaceutical, clinical trial, biologicals and diagnostics industries. The 2004 conference, held in Mumbai, attracted more than 40 speakers from the U.S., representing major pharmaceutical firms, biotechnology companies, universities and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.