This track provides opportunities for life sciences professionals to enhance their leadership capabilities, career development strategies, and project, program and portfolio management expertise to deliver successful outcomes in an evolving industry landscape. It welcomes content across two focus areas, allowing abstract submitters to choose the lens that best fits their topic:
- Professional Growth and Leadership Development Themes: Topics focused on career and leadership growth, communication in regulated and scientific environments, business acumen, critical thinking, and organizational savvy. Includes leveraging technology such as AI, virtual reality, learning management systems, and microlearning, applying ethical principles to technology use, and understanding how organizational culture shapes performance, promotion, and career advancement
- Project, Program, and Portfolio Management & Strategic Leadership Themes: Topics focused on value realization with strategy, planning, and execution across the lifecycle. This includes and is not limited to: project management skills, new ways of working with novel therapeutics, emerging capabilities, new tools (e.g., AI) and flexing leadership styles to navigate an evolving industry landscape. Project Managers increasingly need know-how to drive organizational transformation, expand value and access in emerging markets, and to foster innovation and acceleration.
Whether building individual skills, advancing team performance, or delivering complex programs, this track equips professionals with the knowledge, strategies, and tools to succeed in a global, regulated, and rapidly changing environment.
Prefessional Development & Leadership Themes:
- Professional, Personal, and Leadership Growth: Developing resilience in receiving and applying feedback, managing up and across functions, and building sponsor, ally, and mentor relationships to strengthen leadership effectiveness and career impact
- Strategic Career Planning and Advancement: Designing and owning your career path through promotion readiness, understanding your environment and influence, and actionable goal setting for long-term growth
- Communication and Influence in Regulated and Scientific Environments: Building credibility and framing communication for impact across functions, levels, and global regulated settings
- Business Acumen and Organizational Savvy: Understanding and navigating how organizations operate and make decisions and generates value, linking personal contributions to broader strategies, and demystifying corporate structures and strategic planning
- Critical Thinking and Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Enhancing judgment, problem-solving skills, and data interpretation, including AI outputs, to drive informed and confident action
- Leveraging Technology for Advance Career Journeys: Using AI, virtual reality, learning management systems, gamification, and microlearning to enhance skills, knowledge, and career visibility for personal advancement
- Ethics and Responsible AI Use: Applying ethical principles to AI in professional roles, ensuring transparency, mitigating bias, and maintaining accountability in decision-making
- Culture and Organizational Dynamics: Exploring how culture shapes leadership styles, performance, growth opportunities, and promotion pathways to align individual and organizational values
Project, Program and Portfolio Management & Strategic Leadership Themes:
- Emerging Capabilities, Therapeutics, and Technology Integration: Leveraging agentic AI tools to streamline deliverables, applying technology platforms to enhance visibility and impact, and building expertise in emerging therapeutics such as radiopharmaceuticals, Cell & Gene Therapy and novel vaccine or drug platforms
- Evolving Leadership in Project Management: Leading high-performing project teams by bridging generational gaps, cultivating the human side of PM and team dynamics, and applying practical decision-making models that enable teams to act at the lowest appropriate level
- Expanding Value and Impact Beyond Conventional Deliverables: Extending the value of PM beyond drug registration and market authorization by designing access strategies for underserved populations, managing post-trial access requirements, overcoming infrastructure challenges in underserved markets, and building partnerships to expand reach and capabilities
- Driving Organizational Transformation Through Project Management: Using project management principles to scale capabilities across the enterprise, implement new ways of working, navigate centralized or decentralized PM models, and leverage alliances, consortia, and external partnerships to enhance or supplement internal capabilities
Key Questions to be Addressed:
- How can life sciences professionals strengthen leadership skills, emotional intelligence, and strategic communication to build high-performing, inclusive teams in a global, regulated environment?
- What project management frameworks and execution strategies can drive successful outcomes across complex, resource-constrained, and cross-functional drug development programs?
- How can organizations and individuals foster mentorship, sponsorship, and career planning to develop future leaders and retain top talent in an evolving workforce?
- What tools, technologies, and approaches can accelerate professional growth and enable project leaders to deliver enterprise-wide transformation and value across the product lifecycle?
