Titan of Science
Dr. Henrietta Ukwu has a Mission in Medicine
By Lango Deen
Jan 13, 2010, 13:22

This article was first published in Women of Color magazine in 2003. Dr. Ukwu is currently vice president of Global Regulatory Affairs at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. In December 2009, she was named Scientist of the Year by the 24th Black Engineer of the Year STEM Conference.  
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Henrietta N. Ukwu, M.D. had a desire to touch lives. After her graduate medical training -- including residency training in internal medicine at the University of Tennessee's Baptist Hospital and training in infectious diseases through a fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center -- she stayed on a year at Vanderbilt and then was appointed chief of infectious diseases at another hospital nearby. But the doctor had a bigger mission. "There was this drive within me. I really wanted to touch many more lives," she says.

So she talked to a few people in industry and opted to leave academic and clinical medicine for pharmaceuticals. "It was a difficult decision," she explains. "All I knew was how to be a doctor, how to treat patients.

"It was easy to see with the pharmaceutical industry...that we were in fact touching millions of lives around the world, changing their lifestyles, giving them good quality of life, and giving them hope for the future," Dr. Ukwu continues.

She joined Merck in 1992 as director for Regulatory Affairs, gaining a unique breadth of drug/biologics development and regulatory experience with her work on Crixivan, an HIV protease inhibitor drug, and Varivax, a chicken pox vaccine. Four years later, as senior director, she headed Merck's Worldwide Regulatory Affairs Vaccines/Biologics, interacting with regulatory agencies world-wide.

She became a vice president of Merck Research Laboratories in 1998, and managed a team of regulatory personnel, including senior scientific/technical staff, and was involved in providing management guidance in all aspects of biologics/vaccine development. She won Merck's Distinguished Divisional Scientific Award for her work with Crixivan that same year.

Last year, she transitioned to a new role in the newly created Global Regulatory Policy Department. She is also a professor at the Graduate School of Pharmacy, Division of Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs, at Temple University.

Dr. Ukwu says the knowledge and training she gained as a physician, especially within her fellowship area of infectious diseases, has been helpful in working as a regulatory scientist, as she has for most of her career. The early training gave her an understanding of drug and vaccine development activity and of her current customer base of physicians.

"If you think about my career and my life," she says, "managing people [and] teaching students have taught me about myself, and it has helped me in terms of my interaction with other people, my children, and my home."

Home, she says, is adorned with the richness of her Nigerian culture, an exceedingly supportive husband Isaac, who is an engineer turned health and beauty product entrepreneur, plus teenage children already decided on medical careers: Victor, 19, on the premed track, wants to pursue rehabilitative medicine. Yvonne, 18, also in premed, is taking molecular biology. And Henry, 16, is also keenly interested in pursuing medicine.

"My educational background has helped me tremendously with my work," Dr. Ukwu says, "and then, of course, people tell me that I bring the warmth and colorful nature of my Nigerian culture to the workplace."

About her leadership philosophy, Dr. Ukwu says: "Hard work, honesty, and humility," what she calls her 3 "H"s, "embrace a lot of values and encompass a lot of attributes that I think a good leader should have.… It's important that a leader clearly articulate a vision and espouse a specific approach to implement that vision."