In today’s society, many people are pushed aside and maltreated. That’s why Tony Martignetti’s guest today, Dr. Joanne Kamens, has a strong drive to create and support a diverse and inclusive culture. Dr. Joanne is the Interim Executive Director at The Gloria Cordes Larson Center for Women and Business at Bentley University. In this episode, Dr. Joanne shares her personal experiences with gender discrimination. As she moves forward in her call for change, she encounters more stories from silent victims, especially women, who are harassed and maltreated in the workplace. As a result, she’s working on a project called Friends of Sarah, a support group for women who have been harassed or bullied during their science training as grad students. If you’re passionate about supporting a diverse and inclusive culture, you’d love listening to this episode.

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Supporting A Diverse And Inclusive Culture With Dr. Joanne Kamens

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Joanne Kamens. She received her PhD in Genetics from Harvard Medical School and has had a varied career in academia, pharma, biotech and non-profit. She has been serving as the Interim Executive Director of Bentley University Center For Women and Business. For a decade, she was the Executive Director of the non-profit biotech, Addgene. She has been advancing diversity and inclusion for decades, including as Founder of the Boston Chapter of the Association for Women in Science, MASS AWIS. She is Chair of the Seeding Labs Board of Directors and supporting mentoring programs for science trainees.

She gives her over 80 talks each year on career topics all over the world. She speaks widely on topics such as winning company culture, implicit bias, management 101, making the most of mentoring relationships, work-life negotiation, and building relationships for success. She lives in Newton with her rocket scientist husband. Her children are both grown. One is a mechanical engineer and the other one is a healthcare data scientist. She's married, with one grandchild. Joanne, I want to welcome you to the show.

Thanks, Tony. I'm very happy to be here.

I'm looking forward to digging into your story. I had the pleasure of seeing the impact that you make in the world through our journeys intertwining at times. I'm thrilled to unwind what it is that has brought you to this place and the world and share it with the readers.

You have helped so many people on their journeys, Tony. I appreciate the conversation.

What we do on the show is we share your story through what's called flashpoints. These are points in your story that have ignited your guests into the world and you have a lot of gifts to share. I want to give you the space to start where you would like to start and share what you would like to share. With that, Joanne, please take it away.

There have been two main themes in my life. One is as a scientist and one is as an advocate for diversity and inclusion. My scientist flashpoint was I don't know it because I have always been a scientist. I have a picture of me at nine years old receiving my first microscope for Hanukkah. I am delighted. I'm wearing plaid pants. I have David Cassidy posters on the wall. That is something that I am. It's not even something that I do.

I'm a Math geek all through high school. I was the only girl in any of my classes for most of the high school. Math, Science, Physics, there were just a few girls. In fact, I took a statewide Math test in middle school and I’ve got one of the highest scores. They had to have me go through a battery of analyses with psychologists because they didn't understand why a girl had scored so high on the test. It was unusual in this competition.

We can find the commonalities so we can appreciate each other’s differences.

I'm old but I'm not that old. You can realize that there have been a lot of problems with diversity in STEM since my early days. I powered through taking as much Biology as possible. I always wished I had taken more Chemistry because I needed it later. A lot of Biology in college, which was a great experience. I went to the University of Pennsylvania. I'm a proud alum, proud Penn mom. My daughter went there also. I had a great consciousness. I went straight to grad school. I could not go fast enough more Science. I wanted more Science. I’m heavily focused on technical skills.

I had a great gender blind adviser in grad school. He was incredibly supportive and a fantastic mentor. Also when I told him I was pregnant, I rolled with it. There were no policies. There was no way for me to get paid or deal with it. We didn't have a lot of money. My husband was also a grad student. He made it work and I kept working pretty much straight through. I had my son. It was a good time because we had a lot of flexibility.

I don't think that there are flashpoints there. Perhaps that was a crux point. I don't understand this concept for science trainees about leaving academia. I had no money. I had a baby and I wanted to keep working. I said to my advisor, “I maybe should get a job in the industry.” He's like, “Sure, I will help you.” I spent a lot of time working with scientists who are awkward with this transition. I was like, “It seems like a good idea.” He helped me get a job in pharma and bio techie. BASF was forming an immunology group in Boston. It was a startup pharma at the same time.

That was a bit of a flashpoint, starting my first job, having one kid, and soon having a second kid. That pivotal time was when I had to figure out what kind of scientist I was going to be. What I discovered was I'm always a learning scientist, which is the definition of being a scientist. Any courses or anything that they threw at me, I raised my hand and took it. Management training, time management, knowing the business, all this stuff. I said, “If I'm not going to learn about science, I can learn all this other stuff in the world.” There was a big split then. I'm sure you still see these soft skills, which I hate. I call them plus or required skills.

There was a big separation between your technical skills that's what you needed, and then there were the soft skills that some people were good at. That was a flashpoint because I very early on realized that the plus skills were going to be incredibly important. That was the first turning point. Is that a path that many people have had?

Hearing you describe to us, there are so many things I want to react to. First off, you surround yourself with people who do support you, who see who you are and allow you to become who you want to be is important. There is an element of when you are in a new environment that doesn't do that, it can be stifling, then you start to doubt, whether or not you can be a scientist, can bridge into these other areas, and then you start to recoil but you didn't. You allowed yourself to become the person you are because you surrounded yourself with the right people and allowed yourself to do that.

I also want to say that I did not suffer any overt harassment. There was a lot of faith in place stuff going on in my department. Maybe I'm dating myself, soap opera and telenovela. I was married and had my kid. My advisor and colleagues treated me fairly but that isn't the case for a lot of particularly women. A project I'm working on is something called Friends of Sarah, which is a support group for women who have been harassed or bullied during their science training as grad students or postdocs. I'm frightened if I tell you how many women are participating. It's an anonymous support group, confidential and the stories are horrific.

That is exactly what happens. Sometimes the events are not. You might not call them over harassment or you might say, “Brush it off.” That's what people say, “Just say no.” When I tell some of these stories, people say, “Why don't they say no when their advisers proposition them, invite them to a hotel room or whatever the quid pro quo is?” What happens is it destroys their confidence. The event is horrific, inappropriate and unacceptable. Don't get me wrong. What follows is they don't know if they are good scientists or they have a nice spot that someone is interested in. It gets worse. It's about power, not about attraction. That's usually what it's about.

It's a few people who propagate this but they have an outsized effect on many women. Not just women, men as well but mostly 90% women. It's that confidence that they are restoring. I feel, in a way like I was lucky that I never had that crisis. I had good mentors all through that were supportive, ethical, and trusted me in my next steps.

You have been able to experience that positive experience so you want that for others and it seems to show up in a lot of the work you do. When I hear you stepping into more edges and going into the business world or moving into these things, most people would say like, “You don't belong here. What are you doing here?” You are saying this stuff like, “There are no limits to what I can potentially become. With that, I don't see those limitations so I continue to move on.” I would love to hear more about what else you learned about yourself as you moved into your journey because there are so many things you have done that are amazing, including running a very successful nonprofit, which most people will think, “Non-profit, what?”

I have always been non-profity but I have always done that work for free on the side. That started with founding AWIS, which was a result of a definite flashpoint. If you could have the light bulb go off, that was the light bulb going off. I was at Abbott at the time. Abbott bought BASF, same off for me, one company continues. At the end of my time at BASF, I had been there about 6, 7 years. I walked into a meeting on a Friday and it was my meeting. I had called it. I was the biology lead on a project and it was the biology meeting for this project. I realized I was the only woman for the tenth meeting that week. There had been no women in any of my meetings.

It was my meeting and one of the attendees asked me if I was going to take the notes for the 100th time. These things don't happen but they did happen. I looked at him and said, “Why? Is it because I look like a secretary? What are you thinking? No, it's my meeting. The person who runs the agenda does not take notes. Someone else is going to have to pony up.” To this day, I'm terrible at taking minutes, partially because, I refused to take minutes when I was in my career. I would always say, “You don't want me. I have bad handwriting.” I can't type fast enough, which is not true. I type 100 words a minute.

I'm in this meeting and I'm like, “Where did all the women go? I had women colleagues.” It turns out that for a variety of reasons, many of them related to them being women. Most of the senior women in the organization had left. I was third in seniority and I was only a senior scientist. There was one director, one assistant director, and then it was all men. That was a big light bulb moment and I'm a scientist. I went and did research. That's where I was like, “Leaky pipeline. What is this? Where did they go?” How many women were leaving science? How many women were not being promoted? I was like, “I can do anything. I have every opportunity. I have full confidence that I can do anything.”

That initiated a whole series of things. One of which was founding AWIS and one was getting involved in productive mentoring because good mentoring works well, bad mentoring is bad. Good mentoring relationships, what they should look like. How companies and groups can help people find and be good mentors? That was a long journey.

I have been doing that work for many years. Also, I founded a diversity committee at my company, which was very counter, controversial and uncomfortable. Remember, this is not like Black Lives Matter. This was not cool and I fought for it. I went around the company. I'm Jewish so I’ve got a Protestant, Atheist, Hindu, Buddhist and Catholic.

Create and support an inclusive culture.

There was a couple of Black people and I invited one of my friends who was a person of color. He said, “I have to be on the committee because whenever there's a photoshoot, they make me put a lab coat on. He was the black token Black person to be in their photos. It was terrible. I went to my friend who I knew was gay. I said, “I hate to put you on the spot but I need a representation of my diversity council and you are the only one.” He goes, “I am not the only one.” The only one that's out. I'm still friends with those people because we learn together.

There wasn't literature and diversity bonanza that you could go on the internet. There was no internet. That was quite formative. What I learned there was that you have to learn from other people about their experiences. I’m trying to make myself close with lots of different people. If I need to learn about people who are of color, I need to speak to people who are of color and become close with them. I can't observe and assume that I know. That is a tenant of inclusion work and belonging work but I was lucky I was exposed to that much earlier.

This is the time when you become the best leader you could be when you open yourself up to hearing as many voices but also seeing where potentially you have biases that you came in with because I'm sure we all do. We all have biases. Even though you are opening this space up to other people, they were probably moments when you felt challenged. You are saying, “I can’t but I believe that.” Now, I'm hearing differently.

It's not even potentially. We all have biases. Personally, getting to know people. I'm not a great listener. I'm a much better talker than a listener. It is my onus to bear. For me, I have to ask more questions but I also have to have a relationship, try and take the relationship a bit further. That has always been my goal. I have this little game when I'm networking with people. How long will it take me to find that we have something in common, no matter how different you are? I‘ve got to meet people from all over the world so that even added a fun element to the game. How long will it take us to both realize that we are worried about the green Earth and we have started composting with vehemence? It's driving our partner crazy that we are composting aggressively.

I have met people from Nigeria who have that going on. Something is finding that commonality with someone very different from you that helps me get to that place. We are different and there are biases but where can we find the commonalities so that you become not an example but a person? I don't want this to be the example of some segregated group or under-recognized group. I want them to be a person that I can appreciate for their differences.

I'm very geeky and I'm not a great listener but I'm high on empathy. Understanding the other person's point of view has always been my path toward breaking the bias. They are different than me. They think, work, accomplish and communicate differently than me, all those things but we all need to contribute. Using that empathy has been a great tool for me in meeting people that are different.

There's something about what you are tapping into here. You may have been seen as the scientist but you are also the other end of the spectrum, which is this empathetic person who can see things. That in essence is a bias to say that a scientist can't be empathetic but oftentimes, people think of scientists as being analytical and seeing things as like, “We have to look at the data and know what the data is. Until I see the data, I can't make a conclusion.” In reality, sometimes you have to look at the feelings, what are the emotions, and be in the room and both worlds.

I'm data-driven. Don't get me wrong. You won't convince me of stuff without data but when it comes to understanding, data are people that see things differently. Those are good data that you have to take into account all the perspectives. I don't want it to be unfair and untruthfully advocating for lack of data. I'm all for data.

Tell me more about the journey to becoming the leader you are, especially as you started to build up Addgene and create some of these organizations. It's remarkable. I know you didn't do it alone but tell me more about the journey that you had to go on to create it.

Addgene was a perfect opportunity at a perfect time for me. I had spent a lot of time doing bench science, and then managing science, the technical sides of things. I did a stint in biotech at a company called RXi. I loved all of my different roles. It was great fun, fast-paced and super exciting. RNA and RNAi therapies were becoming hot. It was super fun. I had managed a group at Abbott and then moved over to the biotech as the Director of Research. I’ve got to dig into company culture a little bit at a startup like how different the cultures were these two organizations, what it took to motivate people, and understand managing groups of people.

While I'm still doing diversity work on the side and a lot of international inclusion. I'm doing those two things at the same time. Biotech goes into development. Research staff laid off, normal outcome after four years of small biotech. I was looking for work and it's all about the network. I know everybody says that but every job I have ever done has been because somebody knew me. A big part of my job at Abbott was heavy on molecular biology. I was the Molecular Biology Lead in immunology there. That was perfect for Addgene on the science side but moreover, it is a very international, progressive organization that was about to grow dramatically. It had a diverse and inclusive culture.

Its founders were excellent in that way and were about to get big. They needed someone who wanted to focus on the people and science piece. It was like the job description was written for me. Someone who knows about plasma is like, “I have made hundreds of plasma.” It was almost tailor-made. I was super lucky that the founders who are family-founded chose me for the position. I grew along the way as the company grows.

I wouldn't have been ready to manage the whole company in year one but I had eighteen people and that was a good start. From the get-go, I saw Addgene as my petri dish and incubator for like, “I know what makes people tick, how to help them thrive, and how to support an inclusive culture.” I won't say that I knew at that time. Before the craze, we had that as a priority when I first started.

“I'm going to test some stuff. It's a nice experiment. I'm going to get data, what works and what doesn't work.” We made some things that didn't work and we stopped doing those things but we made a lot of good choices early on and we set a roadmap of intention. That's what they say that when you are getting into your diversity journey, you can't be like, “Next year, we are going to be 50% racially diverse.” That's not going to work. You need to say, “In five years, we will be 25% racially diverse. How do we get there? What's the roadmap?”

I had that vision and we realized it. It took us ten years but we increased the racial diversity at the organization. We had a very good gender parody. One of our founders is a woman and she's quite a leader, Melina Fan. Addgene gave me that petri dish to test those things for a whole decade. It turned out well and many things worked. They were not expensive because Addgene is a nonprofit. We had to do those things on a very limited budget. It had to be more about culture, action, intention, practice and other things.

Be transparent. There’s no good point in hiding facts and details.

I left at a good time, though. The organization was powerful, continued to grow and move into new business areas. For me, I'm ready to take the leap into that full-time diversity, culture and inclusion piece. I won't pretend that it isn't partially about rage, the stories that I hear from women and men who have been bullied and harassed in their workplaces and labs, mistreated with inequitable pay. With my role in this community, I hear a lot of those stories. At some point, you must do something.

My way of handling this is to do something about it. I have been doing something about it but I'm ready to go full-time on that. This transition was about putting my full efforts into doing diversity and inclusion in the STEM, work and education world. I have my hand in about twenty different pies but that is delightful to me to be able to do that full-time. It doesn't mean I'm less interested in science or the scientific community. I'm just as interested but my rage took me in this.

I often talk about like, “What do you stand for? What happens when you start to have this fire that builds around the thing that you stand for?” Having this ability to say, “I'm going to do something about it.” Not just having this talk but putting it into action is so important. There’s something that I reflect on around what you did at Addgene that had me thinking about what are the key needs for you to move and be successful. It sounds like intention, learning mindset, and then transparency. That might be an underlying piece of it, which is to be transparent to people that you don't know what you don't know.

Anybody who knows me at all knows that transparency is my strength and weakness. I can't lie. I'm pretty much all out there. I will tell you my intention, and then I will tell you how I'm having trouble with that intention. I will tell you where I would like to be. That is a great way to summarize it. Nothing worse than all talk and no action.

What I see from leaders is they forget how smart their people are because they think they can fool them and say, “We have a DEI officer. We are going to do a pay equity test but we are not going to tell you how we did it. We are not going to show you the data and tell you the mechanism. Trust us. We are good at this. I'm going to be on 100 panels about how important diversity is but I'm never going to show you the numbers. We are never going to set any concrete, smart goals that are going to move the needle.”

“You are experiencing all of the women getting paid less than the men. Young folks, I will show your salaries so you all know that you are getting underpaid and who's getting underpaid. It's women and under historically underrepresented groups for all the bias reasons we know but trust us, we've got this.” That is not working. That is one of the keys. I hate the phrase, “The Great Resignation,” but a whole lot of people said, “I'm not going to take it anymore. You can't snowball me. I'm going to go somewhere where they are doing something different.”

We should call it the great, “I'm not going to take it anymore,” with great frustration and we are moving on. It is crazy.

We have to remember that people are smart and they can't be fooled by intention. They only are going to appreciate action and change. The time has come.

I want to shift gears a little bit and get back into some of the things you have learned about yourself in this journey that you have been on because we have talked about a lot of things. What I want to focus on are the key lessons that you have picked about yourself on this journey that you want to share with people.

There are so many things because we are always learning. This thing about transparency is I give and expect it. That is a high value to me. I don't see any good point in hiding or obfuscating facts and details. I'm not saying you should ever be cruel. I'm saying you have to have the conversation. There is a stereotype that scientists are introverted. That is no truer than the normal population. Introverts are quieter but they are fine one-on-one. Maybe they don't like parties as much. I am married to one so I know what that's like. I put high stock in an honest and open conversation that it is worth the time.

I try to do that and have an open and honest conversation. I'm trying to be transparent myself with my planning. I’m not the whole management ethic of like, “Let's not tell them and keep this a secret.” For me, it's like, “How quickly can we communicate this?” Even if we have to say, “We don't know, not sure or can't know,” to me, it is about being open and transparent. I went through the era when people were an FTE like a printer. We are resources and interchangeable. The people are people. They are not the same. They are the core of your organization. You can't do anything without the people. Robots are not going to replace us completely. That is not a thing

You can't treat people like a copy machine, a computer or a piece of equipment. They need people. I believe in managers. I don't believe in a flat structure because a person can only give those people things to a limited number of people. Somewhere between 6 and 10 is about the most people you can get to know enough to help them thrive. After that, you would want to have other people helping them. The reason to have a management structure is the people piece. It's not the logistic piece of it.

What I have been doing is working with many companies. Anybody, not the management team gets lost in the shuffle. They are like, “Manage people, go.” It’s with no training. It is a skill with no philosophy. They are not even told how the company feels about management. What are the goals of your managing? Companies wonder why their cultures don't infuse when the CEO has a certain personality or culture. Why is that not happening all over? It’s because that person can't touch all of the people. You need all of the managers to be on the bandwagon to make culture.

Not that I'm plugging coaching at this point but that's one of the biggest challenges. When I think about where people insert coaching, most of the time, it's with the C-Suite or at the senior level. Honestly, the more you can allow a coaching relationship at the middle management, what happens is you can build stronger foundations for people to become better leaders along that path.

Back to my journey to becoming who I am and I'm sure you can think about these moments for yourself is that I wish I had a coach along that path. That would have been able to help me to see the things that I was doing wrong that I could have done better or to get that boost of confidence I needed along the path. Maybe the mood is changing a little bit but it wasn't that way when I was coming along.

Get a taste of where people are coming from as human beings.

It doesn't necessarily coach education, development, support or whatever it looks like. A mistake that companies make is they wait too long. We are busy raising money. It's like year three before they start to think about culture and it's too late. By then, your culture is fixed and set. They tend to promote without thinking if it's the right person to promote. That's not fair. There was this mythical technical track versus management track when I was back in pharma and it was quite difficult. Occasionally like a superstar would get to choose a technical track and not have a lot of reports.

The way you’ve got more money in prestige usually comes along with managing more people and that is a terrible mistake. I am starting to see companies where you can get paid prestige, fair salary advancement on a technical track, and not managing or managing a lot of people because not everybody should be doing that. It's not the right skill. It's not in everybody's strength. Capitalizing on people who want to become good managers and promoting those people into managerial roles is one of their skills. People are starting to get that you can't force that on someone who's not good at it.

This has been such a great conversation and with every insight you share, we need to get more of this out to the public and make sure people are hearing this because these are very important but I have one last question for you, which is different than what we have been talking about so far. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

I'm a voracious reader since childhood. I went through my voracious science fiction stage for many years and I read a lot of modern fiction. In the last couple of years, I have focused more on nonfiction. I have been trying to introduce more nonfiction into my repertoire of books. I always read a lot of nonfiction publications, papers, and articles but more books. I read 100 books a year. You can think I'm on good reads. I discovered that I like memoirs, which is a little surprising for me because they are not always that well-written but they are always full of interesting insights and transparency, which I find interesting.

When someone tells their own story, the way you are asking me to tell mine, you get different kinds of insights. Some biographies as well when the subject has been involved. I also enjoy those. I read Jane Goodall: A Biography, which was a book I read that had a big impact on me. When I was a kid, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas were the orangutan, chimp, and gorilla women that Leakey decided that women were going to do better at studying primates because they could nurture and become one of the tribe in a way. These three women almost did. There were so few women scientists like Marie Curie and that was it.

For me, as a kid, I had this awe of these women who’ve got to study these animals, write science and lead. Do you see Jane Goodall? She's still a leader. Her whole life, she has been leading the scientific community and the world in how to be. Reading her biography, the stuff she put up with, how she dealt with it for the practicality of getting stuff done, and the things she had to do to do her science was a different day and age but handled with such grace, intelligence, and passion that I thought that was an amazing read. I also had Debbie Harry's Face It: A Memoir. I’m reading biographies and memoirs from people who lived in.

When I was growing up, Blondie was one of the big bands when I was coming through the world. Those are a couple that I have read. I use books to do that thing of getting close to other people. I read a lot of books by people with different perspectives, LGBTQ literature, people from different countries around the world, different colors and races. In that way, both fiction and nonfiction get a taste of where they are coming from as a person. I'm very interested in the partition years between India and Pakistan. Wreaked social havoc on a whole culture. I read a lot of books about that. Those were some of the things I'm reading about.

You mentioned Jane because one of my good friends got an opportunity to introduce her at a talk. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I have her book in my queue so it’s worth reading.

Harvard undergrads had these women in science conference that apparently when Harvard undergrad women invite you, a whole bunch of people will come. One of the speakers was Padma Lakshmi, the model who was married to Salman Rushdie for a while. She is as beautiful in person as she is on TV. Everybody was trying to get pictures with her but one of the other guests was Biruté Galdikas, the woman who studied the orangutans. Being in the same room with her, my heart was on the beat. Everyone was taking pictures with the Padma and I'm with Biruté Galdikas. I'm like, “Could we take a picture? I'm so excited to meet you.” She invited me to come to see the orangutans but we have COVID. Maybe someday, I will get to go.

This is the reason why I love this show. I’ve got a chance to spend time with amazing people like you. I always feel honored because I feel the brilliance of these people coming out, being on display, and sharing with other people. That's what this show is all about. I can't thank you enough for coming on. This has been such an enjoyable time together, revealing you and everything. I want to make sure people know where they can find out more about the work you are doing and where the best they can.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm open to invitations, Joanne Kamens on LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter @JKamens. I'm easy to find on Twitter. I'm at Bentley at The Center for Women and Business. I want to honor the latecomers to the diversity game. Bentley has been doing this work for over a decade. We have been doing fantastic work helping companies start, continue and emphasize their inclusion journey with executive and corporate education. They have many great resources for companies and CEOs that want to start on this journey. I'm enjoying being here, learning from the team, and seeing all the great resources they have and provide. I'm easy to find at Bentley.

Coming from you, that's such a great endorsement. After hearing your story and knowing you, there is an element of this coming from a place of having gone through the journey.

One of the things I always liked about the Bentley program is I do realize that people need to lean in. I am both a lean-in and an unfinished business person meeting in the middle. The Center for Women and Business was always about not the women changing but the workplace changing. We know that that's the thing. We have to stop saying, “Women's voices are too high. They don't golf and ask.” None of those things are true. Women do golf. It doesn't matter what their voices are like. What matters is that we are all leaning in against the bias against these things, which is historically ingrained. They have taken that tack and educating teams to see past that. I admire their early stance on this.

You can't change yourself. You have to change the environment. If you do the inner work, that's fantastic but ultimately, you have to also change the people around you because otherwise, it's not going to necessarily work. Thank you. It’s such an honor and a pleasure to have you on. That's a wrap. Thank you for coming on the journey with us.

Thanks, Tony.

Important Links:

• Bentley University Center For Women and Business
• Association for Women in Science, MASS AWIS
• Seeding Labs
• BASF
• Friends of Sarah
• Jane Goodall: A Biography
• Face It: A Memoir
• Joanne Kamens – LinkedIn
• @JKamens - Twitter

About Joanne Kamens

-Team-oriented Nonprofit Executive PhD scientist with 15 years experience in pharma and biotechnology.
-10 years in nonprofit leadership changing workplace culture to be human centric, inclusive and successful for employers and employees.

Corporate
-Recognized leader in personnel management; Interest and experience in motivation of groups, personnel development and workplace inclusivity
-Leader in strategic planning including evaluation and selection of disease targets and indications, monitoring and advancement of a balanced project portfolio
-Special expertise in management of complex projects and efficient collaboration facilitation including international partnerships

Specialties:
-Collaboration management, Workplace culture and success, Target evaluation/selection
-Nonprofit management and outreach
-People Management and Communication
-Diversity outreach, Women in Science, Science "plus skills" training, Optimization of mentoring relationships especially group mentoring models

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