As an executive at a pharmaceutical company, Ellen Smith Kurtz makes life better for women and babies around the world. For fun, she flies her family’s airplane. “You always need to find your own balance,” she says. “No one will do it for you!”
Through high school and college, Kurtz balanced an affinity for chemistry classes and a desire to help others. She volunteered to help rebuild a West Virginia coal-mining town after a flood. Later she went to East Africa and worked in a maternal and pediatric clinic and interned for Unicef at the United Nations in New York. She attended Mount Holyoke College because, at that time, its alumnae earned more PhDs in the physical sciences and engineering than women from any other college. She did her graduate work in nutritional biochemistry and metabolism at MIT because Course XX included Professor Nevin Scrimshaw’s class in international nutrition policy. “I knew I wanted to do a graduate degree, but I wanted to make sure it was something meaningful and interesting from a science perspective,” she says.
As the senior director of medical affairs and communication for the nutrition business unit at Pfizer, she oversees medical researchers working on products such as baby formula and supplements for infants, young children, and pregnant women consumed in more than 60 countries. She has published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals and has presented at international medical meetings. Through her earlier work at Hoechst-Roussel Pharmaceuticals and Johnson and Johnson, she holds patents for treatments of skin disorders and related drug-delivery methods.
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