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At this year’s GC&E, we’re excited to welcome Louise Proud, Vice President, Global Safety & Environmental Operations at Pfizer, as our keynote speaker on Tuesday, June 24th. Louise brings a background in chemistry, industrial hygiene, and leadership working with Pfizer's long-standing green chemistry and sustainability program. We spoke with Louise to hear about her career path, what makes her passionate about green chemistry, and what she hopes attendees will learn from this year’s conference.
The 29th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference centers on the theme “Good Health and Well-Being Through Sustainable Chemistry,” and at this year’s conference we’re excited to welcome keynote speaker Louise Proud, Vice President, Global Safety & Environmental Operations at Pfizer, as our keynote on Tuesday, June 24th.
As we gear up for the conference, which will take place from June 23—26th in Pittsburgh, PA, we spoke with Louise about the intersection of sustainability with toxicology, environmental health & safety, and pharmaceutical chemistry, as well as her own career path.
Make sure to check out Part 2 to meet the keynote panelists who will be discussing green chemistry and toxicology on Wednesday, June 25th, and stay tuned for the announcement of the final keynote panel who will discuss resilience and sustainability in the face of changing landscapes in the scientific community.
Could you tell me about your career path and how you became passionate about your work?
My career path was activated during my chemistry degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Timing coincided with the launch of a pivotal set of Health and Safety Regulations, commonly known as the European ‘six pack’, setting the standard for Health and Safety in the workplace. The cornerstone of these regulations is a risk assessment framework, for all operations, including those related to chemical storage and use, to help safeguard people at work.
As an undergraduate doing my keystone project in a postgraduate lab, the continual questions about experimental techniques were likely a distraction to the PIs. So, when it came to deployment of the chemical risk framework, my professor asked that I take on the work to build the risk assessments for the research laboratory. At one level you could say, well, this sounds a bit boring and bureaucratic. On the other hand, it ignited a passion in me: how could I apply life sciences education to chemical risk management and ensure worker health? This experience motivated me to pursue graduate studies in occupational hygiene.
While I was working toward my master’s degree, I had the opportunity to meet a range of professionals working in occupational medical and health and safety disciplines including toxicologists from pharmaceutical companies. These conversations sparked interest in understanding how medicines, designed to have a beneficial effect for patients, can also present occupational health and safety considerations in the workplace.
What is the role of industrial chemists in upholding the UN SDG Good Health and Well-Being?
Within Pfizer, our overarching business purpose is breakthroughs that change patients’ lives – that’s what drives us, day-in, day-out. As a science guided organization, Pfizer takes a proactive approach in integrating practices to help safeguard our workforce and limit our impact on the environment and the communities in which we operate, and we aim to serve. We do this by applying scientific knowledge to evaluating the properties of the materials used and developed. This evaluation together with an understanding of the attributes of the pharmaceutical processes, enables us to apply a resource conservation and hierarchy of control approach to our operations. By integrating green chemistry principles throughout our development processes, we aim to protect people and minimize our environmental footprint. It's this proactive approach that enables efficiency in designing out hazards and driving waste from our operations.
Delivery of breakthroughs to patients entails a globally connected supply chain, comprising a broad range of vendors, suppliers, partners, and academics. We know we can’t do it alone. We foster strong connections and take our influence very seriously, such that we continually seek to engage and partner to help catalyze continual improvement in key areas such as process safety, exposure control practices, emission control and environmental sustainability.
What do you see as one of the biggest challenges facing more sustainable practices in the pharmaceutical sector in terms of the U.N. SDG Good Health and Well-Being?
As a multinational organization with a presence in over 120 countries, a key challenge that we continually navigate is differing and evolving standards and expectations around the world. This includes monitoring and taking action to prepare for potential changes to long-standing environmental, health and safety regulations and emerging sustainability reporting and due diligence regulations.
That’s why a key focus is engagement with consortia, groups that bring interested stakeholders together to drive understanding of proposed changes, review the impact and proactively bring comments and suggested alternate approaches so that industry can deliver the intended outcome.
Thinking about the conference and your keynote talk that you'll be giving, are there any new perspectives that you hope attendees will walk away with?
What I would offer is this: we all play key roles in a globally connected knowledge chain, and it's the collective that delivers impact. Industry values our academic and other partners when they constructively challenge and work in concert with us, because innovations without application will only ever be ideas. Industry enables the implementation and advancement of innovative scientific approaches to advance public health. That’s why it's productive to have these roundtables where we each may hold differing frames of reference, but it's the collective perspective that is important, and we all have a role to play in that.