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Bekki Brown serves as President & CEO of UBC, guiding the company’s mission, vision, values, and strategic imperatives. She is responsible for clinical operations, business growth strategy, sales and marketing, and acquisition support.
Bekki brings more than 20 years of senior management experience in the industry to UBC, with a long tenure spanning time at Quintiles, INC Research, and, most recently, Syneos Health. She has held a position on the North Carolina BIO Board of Directors since 2019 and is a member of the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association – Southeast Chapter and CHIEF (an organization supporting women executive leaders). She earned her degree at Duke University and resides in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina.
President & CEO
Brett Huselton serves as Senior Vice President & Chief Business Officer at UBC. Brett joined UBC in 2008 and has greater than 20 years in the pharmaceutical services industry from early development through late phase development, globally – supporting strategy and business development growth strategies across clinical and late stage, through commercially optimized launch strategies.
In this role, Brett is responsible for Sales, Marketing, Business Strategy, Product Development, Proposal Development, Pricing and Connected Healthcare Technologies, as well as Analytics and Insights. Brett is responsible to align UBC’s deep bench of expertise, product and service solutions to address the development, safety, access, affordability and value demands facing our clients as they navigate regulatory, payer, physician and patient demands for a successful initial and ongoing experience with their therapy.
Brett and his teams focus on a deep understanding of the market, regulatory and legislative initiatives, payer and managed market demands to ensure our proposed solutions address the specific demands of our clients – whether in the pre-market setting, as they capture evidence of efficacy, effectiveness and safe use – all the way through supporting their approach to entering the market, establishing an ideal patient access, affordability or clinical coordination program to ensure access to and success on our customers therapy.
Importantly – as the market dynamics change, Brett’s teams are focused heavily on trends that impact the efficiency of the delivery of work, or, impact the evidence generation strategies required to meet both clinical and commercial objectives as our clients define their ideal product label and target market.
Brett and UBC focus on making meaningful decisions related to impacting the transformation and advancement of patient care through investing in new approaches, tools, data standards and technologies that can streamline acquisition of key data (endpoints), take advantage of advancements in the interoperability between systems being promoted externally across health systems, payers, data providers and pharma – as well as modeling and following the patient journey from clinical research encounters through to commercial care to truly point the market to a more value-driven conversation about a product’s safe use, patient-specific benefit, humanistic & clinical value proposition of the data across both individual Patients and larger real-world populations.
Chief Business Officer
Dr. Annette Stemhagen is an epidemiologist with more than 30 years of public health research experience, including 20 years in safety surveillance of pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and vaccine products. She is the Senior Vice President of Safety, Epidemiology, Registries and Risk Management within United BioSource, where she provides strategic consultative services to pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device clients.
Dr. Stemhagen has specific expertise in safety surveillance and design, implementation, and analysis of epidemiologic studies, registries, large streamlined safety studies, and actual use and observational studies for products in Phase IIIb and post approval. She has designed and evaluated risk assessment studies, including more than 50 regulatory-mandated, long-term global safety studies. She has designed risk intervention programs, risk management evaluation studies, Risk Minimization Action Plans (RiskMAPs), Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS), and risk minimization programs for EU Risk Management Plans for more than 120 products.
Dr. Stemhagen is active in the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and the Drug Information Association. She served on the Board of Directors for each of these organizations. Dr. Stemhagen has held adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine, the Temple University School of Pharmacy, and the Drexel University School of Public Health. In 2004, Dr. Stemhagen was appointed as the first Industry Representative to the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.
Chief Science Officer
Nathan Thompson serves as the Chief Information Officer where he is focused on overseeing UBC’s product development lifecycle, providing consultation to leadership on strategic initiatives enabled by technology innovations best-in-class data integration and analytics.
Nate brings over 20 years of experience leading complex technology, business operations, and corporate strategy initiatives. He most recently served as Chief Information Officer & Head of Corporate Real Estate for Premier Research.
He is responsible for overseeing IT infrastructure, operations and end-user services, enterprise architecture and application development, data and analytics, cyber security, and corporate facilities.
Chief Information Officer
As Chief Legal Officer, Michael leads all of UBC’s legal and contracting activities. Michael brings over two decades of corporate law to his role at UBC, including experience within the biotechnology industry. He has litigated for years at prestigious firms, created his own business, as well as recently serving as the general counsel for a biotechnology and medical diagnostic laboratory.
Michael has strong Pennsylvania and New Jersey roots, having degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, and is still active as a U. Penn alumnus. He earned his J.D. from Cornell University and has been active as an adjunct professor at universities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Chief Legal Officer
Karen Turner serves as the Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer of UBC. In this position, she provides leadership on the systems, infrastructure, and financial discipline to support UBC’s strategic initiatives and enable efficient, scalable growth.
Karen brings more than 25 years of financial management, enterprise resource planning, and cross-functional leadership to UBC, with experience spanning the consulting, telecommunications, and clinical research industries. She joins UBC after most recently being at Clinipace, where she served as Chief Financial Officer. She earned her bachelor’s degree at North Carolina State University and is a certified public accountant. She currently resides in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
Chief Financial Officer
Lakshana serves as Senior Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer where her team focuses on development and implementation of a human resources strategy that supports the overall business goals geared toward accelerated growth.
She brings to this role more than 20 years of human resources experience. She served as Senior Vice President, Business Transformation and Human Resources for DFC Global Corporation in Malvern, Pennsylvania. In that role, she successfully executed a full-scale RFP to select a systems vendor and implementation partner. She also completed the proposal, design and testing phases of the product platform upgrade and spearheaded a company wide process mapping exercise to create detailed process maps and diagnostics on the “as-is” state of each department, published maps, and shared a gaps register for each area.
She used her expertise to build centers of excellence in core human resources areas such as human resources strategy and policy, total rewards, payroll and benefits, human resources systems and automation, in order to support the growth and expansion in North America and Europe.
Lakshana holds a BS in Hospitality Management from Temple University and a B. Com from the University of Delhi.
Chief Human Resources Officer
Serving as UBC’s Senior Vice President & Head of Patient Support Services, Nicole Hebbert is responsible for all Patient Support Services within UBC. Nicole leads the Operational Excellence, Client Satisfaction, Patient Engagement and Program Delivery teams. Nicole’s responsibilities extend externally to our client relationships – where, she is responsible for our consulting initiatives surrounding a specialty product’s market entry and supply chain considerations. These considerations include wholesale and/or distribution approaches for drug delivery that optimize not only the commercial goals for the brand, but, is also informed by the site of care, coverage dynamics of the product, as well as prescriber and patient-centered needs for access to therapy with positive outcomes.
With over 25 years leading Specialty Pharmacy and Pharma Services teams, Nicole brings forward a unique perspective and experience set to solving today’s patient services challenges. Focused on transformative and technology-enabled solutions, her strategic engagement model provides consultative and meaningful solutions to all phases of specialty drug commercialization. Nicole’s ‘high tech’ and ‘high touch’ model of designing, implementing, and operating her programs make her a strong business partner to our clients, and, a strong leader.
Equally committed to employees and patients, Nicole is responsible for the operational health of all Patient Support Services programs at UBC. Using qualitative and quantitative measures, she believes in the constant evolution of services. As payer, privacy, and regulatory shifts demand early insights and prospective solutions, the dynamic challenges of access, affordability, and adherence are untangled by Nicole and her team.
Nicole has previously served as Vice President, Pharmacy Operations at Priority Health, where she launched some of the industry’s earliest reimbursement hubs and patient support programs for Aetna Specialty Pharmacy and Walmart Specialty. She subsequently spent 9 years in a variety of operational and strategic roles, with increasing responsibility, supporting Express Scripts integrations of Wellpoint and Medco specialty operations. Nicole joined UBC’s leadership team in 2014.
Head of Patient Access Services
Aaron Berger serves as the VP, Peri- & Post-Approval Services for UBC. In this role, he works towards the strategic design and execution of late stage clinical trials and observational research that will generate powerful, real world evidence of product effectiveness, safety, and value.
Aaron joined the UBC team in 2003 and has since served in a range of diverse roles leveraging global capabilities in the execution of peri- and post-marketing product development programs and real world evidence generation. He has supported the development of RWD / RWE architectures and solutions to drive greater insight into the safety profile and value proposition of medicines.
Head of Peri- & Post-Approval Services
Mrs. O’Donnell leads the UBC’s Safety & Risk Management services that oversees product safety and risk minimization activities for pharma and biotech. This includes pharmacovigilance, REMS, RMPs, and the Safety & Epidemiology consulting team.
Mrs. O’Donnell’s background includes more than 20 years of healthcare and clinical research experience and has worked in the area of Risk Management for the last 10 years. Her career began as a registered nurse in the hospital setting where she was responsible for medical surgical patients, pediatric patients, and was a certified oncology nurse. Mrs. O’Donnell’s also spent 2 years as Acute Dialysis nurse, providing renal care to the critically ill. She began in clinical research as a drug safety associate focusing on medical and legal review of medical charts. Then she spent several years in Strategic Research & Marketing where she researched and evaluated the drug development pipeline for major pharmaceutical and biotech companies for a large contract research organization, assisted in the writing and coordination of government proposals, and was responsible for global information requests.
During her tenure, she was awarded the Strategic Research and Marketing award.
During her time at UBC Mrs. O’Donnell has overseen pregnancy registries, investigator-initiated studies, and minority-focused phase IV trials. While in Program Management, she provided support and direction to UBC project teams conducting late stage studies, including regulatory-mandated programs and observational studies.
As the Senior Vice President for Safety & Risk Management, she is responsible for UBC Pharmacovigilance, designs REMS, REMS Supporting Documents, REMS tools, and oversees the team responsible for REMS effectiveness assessments as well as REM’s FDA Assessment Reports. She ensures quality and performance expectations are being met, including responsibility for detailed timeline development and maintenance, budget management, regulatory requirements, and study start-up and operations
Mrs. O’Donnell received her Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing from the former College Misericordia (currently Misericordia University) in northeastern Pennsylvania followed by her Program Management Certificate from Villanova University, also in Pennsylvania.
Head of Safety & Risk Management
Richard Miller is the Vice President, Global Quality Compliance for UBC. He is responsible for the company’s global Quality Management System. Richard has more than 20 years working in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries.
Prior to joining UBC in January 2022, Richard was with eResearchTechnology, Inc. (ERT) where, as part of the executive management team, he helped drive substantial growth for the company through a series of mergers and acquisitions, service line expansions, and proprietary development and deployment of regulatory-compliant technology solutions. Prior to ERT, Richard worked for Atlantic Richfield’s (ARCO) Chemical division in environmental health and safety as a research scientist.
Richard earned his B.S. in Environmental Science from Drexel University in Philadelphia. He lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, spending time between the Philadelphia area and the southern Delaware beaches. He enjoys hiking with his bloodhounds, mountain biking, and the east coast surf.
Head of Global Quality & Compliance