My Career Path: Anita Peil, Mines SWE Founder (Chevron Lecture Series)

Dr. Anita Peil, a graduate from Colorado School of Mines with a BS in Mineral Engineering Chemistry in 1971, recently gave a speech regarding the career path that she chose and how it has impacted her and her ideas. Dr. Peil founded the SWE section at Colorado School of Mines and served as the first president. Then, she went on to obtain a PhD in Food Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After her studies, she went on to work in the pharmaceutical section and now currently has over 30 years of global leadership in both public and private companies across the world.

“No one is there to help you. You have to do it yourself.” Dr. Peil has a familiarity with being independent. She started her career in Switzerland working for Ciba-Gelgy and in the Development Drug Regulatory Affairs department as a group leader. She says that a group leader was one of the lowest positions at the global headquarters. After working there for ten years, she decided to move on and went to Munich, Germany to help startup an European headquarters for Fujisawa. She was a board director for regulatory affairs. This was the most challenging job for her because she was part of the “company creation, strategy and operations, and being able to manage in the national and international level.” After seven years of hard work, she was ready to move on again. For the next two years, she worked for Almirali in Spain, Debiopharm in Switzerland, and as a Biomedical Researcher at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Currently, she is consulting for two companies, ALP Pharma Consulting in Switzerland and Europa Rx in London. She is in charge of consulting in the areas of strategy formulation/implantation, drug designation, drug delivery, and international operations for those two companies.

If you are interested in starting up a company and looking for strategies, Dr. Piel recommends visiting this guidebook: http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/downloads/pdf/inventors_guide.pdf. This pdf guide outlines 10 steps to commercialization which starts at research and ends at revenue. More information can be found in the guidebook. In order to succeed in your plans, Dr.Piel suggests, “it is up to you to define success and when you what to do that, but nothing can stop you, once you have.”