Adrienne R. Takacs, PhD

Adrienne Takacs, PhD, is an accomplished Senior Pharmaceutical Executive with more than 30 years of success across the biotech, pharmaceutical, and neuroscience industries.  Leveraging extensive experience leading R & D organizations to achieve key milestones and guiding business development and key alliances to impact business goals, she is a valuable asset for companies in the life sciences sector working to surmount obstacles with developing a new product under tight deadlines, on developing strategic partnerships and putting the right steps in place, or on operational improvements to increase productivity and reduce costs.  Her broad areas of expertise include R & D, business development, personnel development, operations, regulatory compliance, strategic alliances, risk management, and process improvement.

Throughout her executive career, Dr. Takacs has held leadership positions at companies including Eli Lilly and Company and Johnson & Johnson.  She has recently moved into retirement from 17 years with Eli Lilly, concluding as Senior Director and COO from 2008 to 2017.  Here she was instrumental in developing high-performance strategic alliances that helped drive revenue of more than $1.6B over 10 years, oversaw $110M of spend on global externally sources pharmaceutical discovery and development, and served as COO of Neuroscience Research and Clinical Development.  This followed six years as Senior Director of Preclinical Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, where she managed more than 100 scientific personnel supporting R & D, drove integration of global research functions to increase productivity of milestone deliverables, and spearheaded improvements to reduce research cycle time and unit costs by 15%.  She earlier spent 3.5 years as Director of Preclinical Drug Metabolism with Johnson & Johnson, where she led successful work in drug discovery & development and earned the Tribute to Women and Industry Award in New Jersey.

Adrienne holds a BA in Biology from Ithaca College and a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Kentucky.  She has held positions with Fairbanks Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center, Hope Academy Charter School (Finance Committee), and Biocrossroads (External Advisory Board).