“The International Healthcare MBA at Frankfurt School has been a truly remarkable learning journey on a personal and professional level. The key value of this MBA is its strong focus on healthcare and its international spirit. This programme brings together healthcare leaders and faculty from across the globe and across different healthcare stakeholders, which provided me with a much broader and deeper understanding of the healthcare market and numerous insights into different viewpoints, cultures, values, and ways of working that had a strong impact on my own view of the world, healthcare and leadership style.
The different modules allowed me to explore established healthcare markets like Germany, the UK or the USA as well as new exciting growth opportunities in India, the Middle East or Asia. I believe that integrated, seamless and personalised care will become very important, which will require the various stakeholders to collaborate much more closely on a regular basis. The MBA has prepared me optimally for that and thus I believe it will be paramount for my future career in the pharmaceutical industry.”
Daniel has always been fascinated about developing medicines for patients with high unmet medical need and in particular the complex pharmaceutical R&D machinery, and how human interactions, business operations and management can influence its productivity. Born and raised in Switzerland, he followed his fascination and studied a Master’s degree in life sciences and management at the University of Zurich, Switzerland and the University of Montana, United States.
Daniel began his career at Roche in 2015 at the age of 25 as Business and Operations Manager of an R&D Project Leader department, implementing new tools for scientific knowledge sharing and capacity management. He then took over the leadership of implementing new regulatory guidelines for the automatic data exchange with the US FDA called SEND – guaranteeing the license to operate for all future submissions.
After positioning Roche as the partner of choice for the FDA to test new SEND implementations in 2018, he moved on to assist in a strategic reorganization integrating and streamlining two operations departments.
Following the successful merger, he was promoted to Chief of Staff of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department with 550 employees in Switzerland, UK, China and the US. In this position he was in charge of the Global Office and responsible for business operations, employee engagement and transformation activities. He was actively driving and steering the cultural and strategic agile transformation for the global department. It was during this period that Daniel completed his MBA in International Healthcare Management, which was an important source of inspiration to help anticipate the future need of the healthcare system and how R&D can contribute to that. In his award-winning MBA thesis Daniel focused on new pricing schemes for gene therapies that allow risk sharing between the healthcare system and pharmaceutical companies to allow patients early access to potentially life-saving medicines without overburdening the healthcare budget.
After 1.5yrs in this role Daniel took over an agile leadership role to catalyse the digital transformation of pharmaceutical sciences, a key strategic focus area to increase R&D productivity and bring Roche one step closer to its mission: bringing twice as much medical advancements to patients for half the cost to society.