Executive edge: Jill Farnham: newspaper ad led her to Fitzsimons epicenter.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: Real estate development

It's not often someone lands a career-changing job by answering a help-wanted ad in a newspaper. But that's how Jill Sikora Farnham became controller of a startup agency that would grow to become Colorado's $4.3 billion "square mile of life sciences"--the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority in Aurora.

A certified public accountant who began her career with a Big 8 accounting firm before moving into real-estate development to work on such projects as the Inverness Hotel & Conference Center and the Denver Design Center, Farnham's first task at Fitzsimons was to negotiate the deal of the decade--the City of Aurora's purchase of the land that housed the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, founded in 1918 and targeted for closure in 1999.

"It was complicated, unusual, bureaucratic and one of the most interesting processes I've ever been through, if you think about all the layers of government that were involved in the project," says Farnham, who joined the Fitzsimons authority nearly a decade ago and has since been named the organization's acting executive director, overseeing a staff of nine.

Her office now is located in the Bioscience Park Center, which opened on the Fitzsimons campus in 1999. It's modern but modest and a far cry from the authority's early years when a dozen people would ramble around the 11-story, 400,000-square-foot medical facility where President Eisenhower once recovered from a heart attack.

"It was an interesting environment. Our offices were old hospital rooms that still had the old oxygen tanks and privacy curtains," recalls Farnham. "When I think of the site then and the changes that have been made in a relatively short period of time, it's quite...