Frances Holmwood
Opportunities Manager
Frances has more than 20 years of experience in the drug discovery industry. She graduated from the University of Southampton with a degree in Chemistry and began her career as a synthetic organic chemist at the Sandoz Institute for Medical Research. In 1993, she joined Pfizer, Sandwich initially working on programs in the urogenital and sexual health therapeutic areas, such as M3 antagonists for incontinence and PDE5 inhibitors for erectile dysfunction. Frances then took on responsibility for the creation of experimental and general routes sections of patents across the whole department, liaised with project chemists and attorneys regarding patent scopes and claims, and developed and presenting IP related training courses for chemists at all levels of the organisation.
Frances then took on a number of roles of increasing seniority in business management across the research departments of Pfizer, Sandwich. She provided business and operational support to the chemistry and biology department leadership teams, with responsibility for departmental communications, information security, data and information management and agenda management. Additional responsibilities included the project management of non-scientific initiatives, such as creation and coordination of training courses, implementation of reward and recognition programs and recruitment of IT students.
She recently took on a dual role as project support lead and project manager on a program, responsible for the disposition of data and systems required as a result of the re-structuring of a major pharmaceutical company. Her main focus was the identification and analysis of information sources, gaining confirmation of disposition decisions from information owners and execution of those decisions. She also co-developed a decision analysis tool to enable the disposition by the company of “orphan” data.
Frances has been a Network Partner and Opportunities Manager with The Research Network since July 2013.
Expertise
Chemistry-Synthetic, Patents, UK