This month, the Symeres BD team welcomed a new member: Dr. Karen Damian. Karen will be supporting our development and solid-state chemistry services in Europe and North America. Karen was born and raised in Italy and has a background in chemistry. After doing her PhD on homogeneous catalysis in St Andrews in Scotland, she moved to France, for a postdoc at the CNRS – University of Nice on mechanistic studies of the Lewis acid catalyzed cycloisomerization of 1,6-dienes.
Karen then to started working in the lifesciences business. She spent the first few years working as Sales Manager in a start-up company offering customized immobilized enzymes for use as biocatalysts before moving to a Japanese trading company where she was involved in the import and export of generic APIs and intermediates to Japan and Europe. Considering her chemical background and specific interest in customized solutions to projects, Karen then joined a CDMO, where she was able to combine her technical and business development expertise.
“In a CDMO, I got to work with many different clients, which meant no two working days were ever the same.” After several years, Karen moved to Lundbeck in Italy, where she continued to work as Business Development Manager for the Custom Development and Manufacturing Division of Lundbeck, with responsibility for both European and American markets.
Recently, Karen met our Director of Innovation and Business Development, André de Vries, at an event where they started talking about Symeres and our capabilities. “While I wasn’t actively looking for another job opportunity, I was interested in contributing to a company in the dynamic, earlier stages of R&D.”
Karen can especially look forward to a lot of variety in her job working for Symeres, where she will use her strong knowledge of drug development as our API facilities in Weert and Prague keep expanding.
If you are a biotech or pharma company, we’d love to hear about your drug discovery or development needs. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
