 Dr. Kaufman is Innovation and White Space Lead for New Product Development R&D for GSK Healthcare. Dr. Kaufman is affiliated with a Kwa Pa and Pawnee Nations of Oklahoma and currently chairs the Executive Compensation Committee for the Kwa Pa Nation of Oklahoma. He received a BS in Biochemistry from the University of Kansas and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Kansas. Prior to his position at GSK, he led intellectual property and informational research for global healthcare at the Proctor and Gamble Company. He has served on the Board of Directors of SOCNOS, the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Hispanics, Native Americans in Science and was a member of the Executive Committee of SOCNOS as well. Welcome Dr. Alan Kaufman and thank you very much for joining us today. Looking forward to your remarks. All right well thank you very much for being here today and thank you to Dr. Comer off for inviting me to to share my perspective of leadership and STEM with you. I hope that you find what I have to say interesting as far as my trajectory and experience in an industry. Just a little bit of a agenda here. I'm going to talk a little bit about my background. I'm going to talk about how I approach leadership and in terms of industry and why DEI matters. A little bit about my leadership trajectory and then some things that GSK does to go beyond with regards to DEI and social responsibility as well as GSK Consumer Healthcare. Obviously they're they're paying me to be here so I want to make sure that I put in a plug for the number one consumer healthcare company in the world. So why am I here? As Dr. Lopez mentioned, I am Indigenous so I affiliate with the Qualpaul Nation of Oklahoma and the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. I hold a doctorate in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and I work for GSK Consumer Healthcare. So URG STEM scientists working in industry. And as I looked at the goals of the workshop I just wanted to highlight some of the things that I hope that you take away from what I am talking about today. Really the pathway for myself. Talking a little bit about the programs that helped provide me these experiences to help support and but also kind of prepare me for leadership positions. And then a little bit as I talked about GSK incentivizing institutional change through policies and companies. So I'm a chemist. I talk in sometimes reactions and so obtaining a position of leadership in a STEM field within the private sector is a product of both the individual person, so me, but also others that are in that reaction. You have to accept this. If you do, it'll help improve your yield in the future in that yield being leadership positions. So the way I think about leadership in industry is kind of like an S-curve. This is how I approach innovation, looking at white space and innovation and product development, trends, things like that, how you must invest and then ultimately there's a growth phase and then a stagnation phase. It's the same thing with a career or a time in a role or whatever. You invest time at the beginning. You establish yourself as a scientist. You start to discover things autonomously. You demonstrate that skill set and then at some point, those are all individual contributions. We call those individual contributors in industry where you're the one doing the work, discovering the new things and typically you can do that through apprenticeships or guidance from senior technologists or scientists, but at some point, there's a tipping point. You end up not just demonstrating, but actually leading. You find yourself accelerating your ideas. You find yourself at some point looking back and serving others and in order to do that, you've established yourself through this S-curve. One of the things that I wanted to talk about and I hope that you kind of take from my talk is that there are people at each one of these steps that help you. It's not just you. Even though I said individual contributors, there's a lot of mentorship. There's a lot of guidance that happens in each one of these steps, but in order to do that, this just isn't just one set of curves. This is actually an aggregate of curves. While you might have invested and established yourself and are working through one specific role, eventually you'll stagnate. What you want to do is you want to be able to start to grow. You want to be able to start to build on all of these experiences, all of this scientific foundation that you've grown in yourself and invested in yourself that then starts to build. You have a choice. Either you can let it stagnate and you have this red line that doesn't have as much impact or you can continue to grow and ultimately end up yielding more impact in a leadership position over time. The reason I bring that up is because one of the biggest things that I think that most folks, especially as a person of indigenous background, is we come from a certain culture and that culture has certain different behaviors, leadership behaviors. We have sometimes difficulty looking people in the eye and that can be a negative leadership trait because we're very humble people, but what I'd like to have a discussion about is really how do we identify those inflection points. Those inflection points that basically say that we're not going to stagnation, we're going to go to a new phase of growth for ourselves so we can have a larger impact so that we can become those leaders that we truly have the capability to be. One of the things that I do and have done is to analyze my trends and behaviors, my contribution, my growth over time, my responsibilities. I put that into context of how I've operated successfully. Navigating an inflection point is one of the most important things you can do because it's that point where it makes or breaks the next phase of what it is that you're trying to achieve. And so really you have to understand your capabilities and experiences. You have to start to open doors. We've heard a lot about mentors, but networks are also very important. We have to lean on our champions. We have to lean on those champions and those mentors and external colleagues for guidance. One of the things about and I'll show you this in my S-curve is I cannot understate the impact that having a champion for you in a company matters to getting to a leadership position. If you do not have a boss that advocates for you or a manager that's giving you the right opportunities, there is little chance that you will achieve that success. Now how not to navigate an inflection point is something that I think folks also need to have a little bit of an understanding of. Avoidance and seeking help, closing yourself off, not upskilling, exploring possibilities and leaning too heavily on the things that have gotten you to that point so far. We all have to grow. And so those are things that I think that, you know, folks that are aspiring to be leaders need to kind of understand and be self-aware. You need to be prepared, have an ability to adapt, really, really build your network and be humble in everything that you do. So my trajectory. So as, you know, in 1999 I started as a pre-farm pharmacist. I wanted to improve the lives of people using pharmaceuticals. At the time I think it was genetic pharmaceuticals that were was kind of the buzzword that really, really excited me. And I thought that pharmacy would be the way to do that being from a small town in southeast Kansas. Well little did I know that I didn't want to be a pharmacist but I wanted to research the mechanisms of drug actions and be able to modify those drugs in order to provide a benefit. And so through the office for diversity and science training I was actually taken under an IMSD grant. And that paid me to do research in a lab in Dr. Middall's lab at the University of Kansas in the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Department. And so I did that work for three, four years until I was admitted into that same department under the advice of Dr. Jeff Kreis working on intracellular pharmacokinetics of amine containing drugs to help benefit cancer chemotherapeutic applications. I defended in 2008 and then was my first role was at PNG. So at PNG I was able to do a lot with over-the-counter drugs. I had various different roles in that and then from there I leveraged that experience and intellectual property and information research into looking at external innovation in a more regulated sector of medical device innovation. And then from there kind of combining those two skill sets I am now the White Space and Innovation Lead for GSK Consumer Healthcare. And throughout that entire experience I've not only learned new skills but have also created a bigger impact in each organization that I go to. So below all that are the things that have helped support that trajectory. And so when I mean below all that I mean the things that I've done that have you know been available to me to help create not only visibility but apprenticeship, mentorship, leadership guidance and just general opportunities to grow my skill set. And so initially it was I had never done lab-based research. Well there you go KU, IMSD Grant and Dr. Jim Orr. Thank you very much that really helped. I went to my first SACNIS conference and was able to present nationally my scientific research in front of a pretty diverse organization and scientist. From there I obviously hit the role at P&G but then from that it was I was only getting the one worldview from P&G. What about the other different types of leadership that are out there that I can learn from? And so I was actually admitted to the Linton Poojri Leadership Institute that SACNIS had as a program in their organization. From there one of the goals of that leadership institute was to start to broaden my impact in the DEI space. And so companies as many of you are aware have different ERGs and those are really really good opportunities for aspiring leaders to get involved with. Not only does it provide access to executive sponsors but different types of leaders that have different experiences, backgrounds from you to learn from. So I actually co-led the Native American Network at P&G for several years, was then looking to again broaden my skill set, went to the SACNIS Board of Directors, was elected there and learned a little bit about non-profit governance and how those different types of organizations operated with oversight of the fiduciary aspect. In between there, me and my wife started a small business which was great. And then I was able to get a little bit more exposure to operations and government through the Executive Compensation Committee, which they have committees for everything, but really this is a board that oversees the compensation and the recommendations for compensation for the executives in the nation. And so I'm learning now from CEOs of companies on how to set this, how to manage this and make it sustainable. So as you can see, everything I've done, I've built but I've utilized these different programs to help enable my growth. And in doing so, I've worked on some really cool stuff. These are all the brands that I've worked on and I couldn't have done it without all of that support. But really at the bottom line, it's people. So in each one of those different lines into that S-curve, it was one of these folks that was pushing me, that was opening that door. So whether it was Mr. Metzger in seventh grade science or Joseph Byrd, Chairman of the Kwa Pa Nation, really just giving those opportunities to lead. You have to know who those people are in your life and those are the mentors, those are the champions, those are the people in your organization that are going to lift you up, push you to do better and always fight for you. One of the things that I've learned along the way is that I'm now that person in other people's lives. And so really just advocating to do this work for my nations and also for the people in my organization. So going beyond, so kind of switching gears a little bit more into the corporate world, GSK operates on three different principles, our people, our business, our communities. And I think they have some good examples of ways that they're making a difference in the space. And so these are things, every single thing that you see here is something that I could be involved with at a leadership level. I could get integrated into each one of these activities and make a difference. And this is incremental to my day job of leading white space and innovation for new product development. But just kind of articulates the point that these are now opportunities for people to get involved. So I can recruit, we can maintain programs to develop and retain diverse talent. These are some of the metrics of which GSK wants to improve that situation. So by 2025, they aspire to have 45% female representation of senior roles. Similarly, 30% ethnically diverse leaders and VP and above roles. And so active programs for URG development, we have those programs. I am actively involved in some of those programs, as well as ERG leadership in the company, the business aspect. And so I think this goes without saying, but just want to kind of point it out that when you combine gender and ethnic diversity, the McKinsey study shows that 25% of all of that is basically rolled up into these companies are going to have 25% better financial performance than those that are less diverse. So we take that into consideration and then our communities. So we are very active in our communities at the local level. I'm in Richmond. So we do a lot in the Richmond communities with different schools. But then also here's a good example of GSK in Philadelphia creating and supporting the Philadelphia STEM equity initiative. And so there's a lot of not only dollar capital, but a lot of also people capital that's spent to help further enable those with opportunities similar to how I explain to my trajectory. And then here's the shameless plug. I'm not going to go through it, but I just wanted to say thank you for your time. If you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, happy to continue the conversation and happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you.