Celebrating three impressive careers: financial executives International honors and celebrates the inductees into the 6th annual FEI Hall of Fame.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: Cover story

Imagine a career where through doing the work you love--the finance function--you could work with and contribute real value to the efforts of leading scientists and researchers on projects that enable, expand and improve the quality of life for millions of people on the planet. That sums up will Judy C Lewent has been doing for most of her 39-year career thus far.

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Lewent became interested in the pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries while working ptizer Inc. in I976-80, and was subsequently recruited by Merck & Co. Inc. in 1980. Since retirement from Merck in 2007, Lewent maintains active participation in the industry by serving on the boards of GlaxoSmithKline plc, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. and a group of privately held pharmaceutical companies.

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She recalls being struck by an early Pfizer ad, which said the life of former actor Rudolph Valentino could have been saved with an antibiotic lor just $1. "Those types of stories are innumerable in the industry in terms of transforming human and animal health," she says.

Take vaccines, for example. Merck is a leader in developing several major childhood vaccines including those for mumps and measles. When HIV-AIDS came to the forefront in the early 1980s, Merc k developed some of the first therapies to change patients' lives--turning it from a near-certain death sentence to one where the afflicted could live decades longer.

One of Lewent's proudest moments was the key part she played on the team in the early '80s when Merck forged a joint venture with the drug company AstraZenecal to develop Prilosec, used in the treatment of ulcers.

Early issues surfaced, but Merck scientists were able to manage the situation and bring to market one of the best-selling products in the history of the industry--one that has improved the management of ulcers for countless patients world-wide. Her role grew to co-chair of the Astra-Merck joint venture.

Finance, says lewent, can contribute value to the enterprise. Her talents in business development show how highly skilled financial executives can assist their companies in good times as well as in difficult times.

For example, she led the corporate development activities since the late 1990s and also worked on the structuring of joint ventures with Astra, as well as Schering-Plough Corp., Johnson & Johnson Inc., DuPont Co., Sanofi-Aventis Inc. and Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.

She also managed the successful completion of approximately 200 licensing deals and small acquisitions and divestitures over a six-year period.

Significant Life Experiences

Lewent "fell in love with economics" at Goucher College in Maryland, and upon graduation in 1970, continued her education at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she learned finance from renowned professors, including Profs. Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who both won the Nobel Prize for the Black-Scholes formula.

Throughout her career, she has continued to maintain her networks and friendships with such high-level thinkers, and get together and think about finance issues as they pertain to the corporation. It's a rare privilege, she says, "to be able to have those kinds of minds thinking about corporate issues."

She notes that with her colleagues at Merck, she had built a network of experts who were more than pleased to have an ongoing dialogue and apply their advances in research to problems in the corporate world.

Lewent put that academic training to good use from the beginning of her career. Early in her tenure with Merck, she pioneered a new planning model based on the Monte Carlo method, with the thinking that more traditional financial valuation methods seemed not to take account of the long-term nature of pharmaceutical risks.

When facing significant business risk, she says, "We had geared the capital structure to deal with those risks, and were adamant that we were not going to add financial risks to those business risks" In looking back, she notes, "that extremely prudent approach taken over many years showed its merit--especially in 2004 and the years that followed."

One of the reasons she finds finance so interesting, she says, is that "all the problems in finance haven't been solved. So you have to be continuously thinking and learning, and what better way than to have access to intellects like those who are also trying to solve important problems?"

Bottom line, she says, "It's all about the people. No one individual can accomplish anything alone--whether you're a CEO or president of the United States, you need others on your team." Lewent says she learned that lesson early on.

For example, "the contributions of the Merck finance organization over the years were a function of the fact that it was a...