Product Development Champion

Although she’s now considered an East Coaster, Michelle was born and raised in the Midwest. She also spent time living in the South and on the West Coast. In fact, her California friends thought she was crazy for leaving. No one moves to California and leaves, they all teased. Alas, despite the “perfect” temperate weather, the West Coast was not a long-term home for Michelle.

Michelle grew up loving math and science. Realizing she also loved problem solving, she thought to combine engineering and the human body. Lo and behold, she found such a major existed – biomedical engineering. It was still a lesser-known degree at the time, but she found it was a respected and well-developed program at Marquette University, the place she knew was “the one” the first time she stepped foot on campus.

After exposure to the design process during her year-long senior design project, Michelle decided she wanted to experience something other than designing medical devices, so she sought work in a different aspect of the device life cycle – regulatory. Having fallen in love with Washington, DC her junior year while participating in Marquette’s infamous Les Aspin Program, living and taking classes at the satellite campus 4 blocks from the Capitol and interning for FDA, Michelle knew returning to the capital and FDA was an obvious next step. She became a lead reviewer in FDA’s Office of Device Evaluation, working on premarket submissions for medical devices and a few combination products (they were much less common back then). Michelle loved working for the Agency, seeing many different products in all stages of their life cycle, collaborating with scientists of varying disciplines and backgrounds. While she thought she might never leave FDA – promoting and protecting the public health was a mission she felt proud to support, she ultimately decided to leave DC to experience other cities and parts of the country and see yet another side of the product life cycle – working with the companies developing and manufacturing the products. Michelle went on to work in clinical and regulatory, in many different therapeutic areas. While her expertise lies with medical devices, she’s worked with some combination products and pharmaceuticals. Michelle has worked with large and small companies but has most enjoyed the ones where she wore many different hats and learned even more than she came into the role knowing. Hence when the opportunity at Facet presented itself, Michelle was happy to join the team in supporting clients from the early stages of product development through marketing of their products.

Michelle loves helping people and in her professional world that translates into helping companies get products into the lives of people that need them. Her colleagues would say that she’s not afraid to speak up to ask a question in order to better understand a situation or to provide a perspective about which she feels strongly. Michelle is a people person; she prefers and also displays a direct and open communication style. She has the ability to see the big picture and then hone in on the finer details. Michelle is well versed in distilling complex topics into concepts understood by all audiences, framing things in an easy-to-understand yet comprehensive manner, in both written and spoken formats.

Whenever she’s not busy strategizing with biotech firms and thinking outside the box (funny that part of Facet’s mission was also part of the speech addressed to her Marquette Engineering graduation class, way back when), Michelle can be found somewhere outdoors. She’s often torn between the woods, the river, the lakes, and the ocean, as Michelle loves hiking and biking the many nearby park trails, kayaking the lakes, rowing on the Schuylkill River (she prefers skulling over sweeping), and soaking up the sun while reading or throwing a football or frisbee at the shore. Michelle is on a mission to find her perfect home office, one that feels like she’s outdoors while working. Oh and one that suits her sassy Siberian Husky, of course, who shares her love of the sun (she doesn’t know she’s a snow pup!) and the outdoors.