Meet our Diversity Champion – Laura Needleman

On behalf of the pharmaverse council, we’d like to introduce you to Laura Needleman – an active member of our community who has volunteered to support us as a champion around DE&I. All of our efforts to this day have started from the ground up with passionate people putting their hands up to make a difference for our industry and patients all over the world. Therefore, when Laura identified a challenge and stepped forward to help foster solutions, this resonated hugely with us as a group that are looking to learn and evolve continually to make a positive impact in our scope of open source. Here’s some further introduction and context from Laura in her own words…

“Over the summer, I approached the pharmaverse council ready to join forces with a Diversity Champion proposal in hand. As I walked the council through my proposal and thoughts, I believe they saw my passion for equal access and representation was burning bright! I was ready to hit the ground running to help the community members feel represented and heard within pharmaverse.

I plan to work with the council to not only suggest ways to increase more diversity, equity, and inclusion at the top (within the council) and within the community but also as an autistic brain ready to pick apart systems and ask the questions others might not be asking. If there is one thing autistics hit out of the park… it’s disrupting groupthink. Do I hear a record scratch every time I open my mouth and say something? …yes …yes I do…

Jokes aside, one thing that drew my attention to pharmaverse and why I wanted to give my time to further DE&I is because I could see the large-scale movement that was happening from the energy the pharmaverse platform was creating. The increase in R collaboration over the past 4 years in our industry is noticeable and palpable even and I believe that movement is in part because of the systems and communities built off of the pharmaverse foundation. As an R user myself, and as someone in our biometrics clinical reporting community of programmers and statisticians, it’s a grassroots type space where people are coming with their ideas on how to make it better and it grows year by year. Even when that feedback is uncomfortable to hear, such as gender disparity in the council, response and action is taken and that is something I can back and believe in.

As far as my professional background in this space, currently I am the US Policy Lead for Astrazeneca’s Neurodiversity Employee Resource Group, TH!NK, which is a role designed to advocate for neurodivergent employees around accommodations and team perceptions as well as contribute to US Policies from a neurodivergent perspective. I am also an autistic public advocate in our space of biometrics clinical trials where I openly share my experiences in our industry as an autistic woman. I have presented topics of Neurodiversity at both PharmaSUG and PHUSE and have an active voice on LinkedIn. In addition, in 2022, I was awarded Cytel’s CEO award for furthering their DE&I mission.

DE&I work is an intentional process that is done consciously and continuously. My presence within the pharmaverse council is a relationship and not a solution in it of itself. I come to the council as an individual advisor and thus my presence within the council does not represent Astrazeneca joining the council. Please reach out to me if you’d like to chat about DE&I at pharmaverse, in general or on a specific concern! I am listening and I’ll work to elevate voices that need it. Remember, I’m not perfect, I also have a disability, and I am here to do volunteer DE&I work at no cost.

Feel free to reach out via email at any time – laura.needleman@astrazeneca.com or connect and reach out to me on LinkedIn!”

Last updated

2024-12-13 13:35:27.781157

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BibTeX citation:

@online{needleman2024,
  author = {Needleman, Laura},
  title = {Meet Our {Diversity} {Champion} – {Laura} {Needleman}},
  date = {2024-09-03},
  url = {https://pharmaverse.github.io/blog/posts/2024-09-03_meet_our__divers.../meet_our__diversity__champion_–__laura__needleman.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Needleman, Laura. 2024. “Meet Our Diversity Champion – Laura Needleman.” September 3, 2024. https://pharmaverse.github.io/blog/posts/2024-09-03_meet_our__divers.../meet_our__diversity__champion_–__laura__needleman.html.