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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
Ty is responsible for Business Development, Marketing, Proposals, and Sales Operations at UBC. He brings over 20 years of experience in business development and operations spanning the life sciences and technology sectors to this role.
He has held leadership positions with INC Research, InVentiv Health Clinical, Florence Healthcare, and most recently, docs24 where he served as Chief Commercial Officer. He received his Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Wofford College and currently resides outside of Greenville, South Carolina.
Chief Commercial Officer
Annette Stemhagen, DrPH, FISPE is an epidemiologist with more than 35 years of public health research experience, including epidemiologic research and safety surveillance of pharmaceutical and biotechnology products, vaccines, and medical devices. She provides strategic consultative services with a focus on risk evaluation and mitigation strategies (REMS) and developing real-world evidence to meet regulatory and commercial objectives regarding product safety and value.
Dr. Stemhagen has specific expertise in the design, implementation, and analysis of epidemiologic studies, both observational and pragmatic, for products in Phase IIIb and post-approval. She has designed and evaluated risk assessment studies, including more than 60 regulatory-mandated, long-term global safety studies. She has also designed global risk minimization programs and risk management evaluation studies and developed REMS 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. Dr. Stemhagen was appointed as the first Industry Representative to the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. In addition to providing consultative services, Dr. Stemhagen has held positions within the government, academia, and the pharmaceutical industry focused on patient safety.
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
Brett Huselton is the Senior Vice President of Innovation & Strategic Solutions at UBC. Brett joined UBC in 2008 and has more than 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical services industry, from early development through commercial support, globally.
In his role, Brett is responsible for expanding UBC’s partnerships and innovations practice, ensuring the deployment of strategic solutions. Given Brett’s tenure with UBC and extensive industry experience, he is focused on evangelizing UBC’s unique position in the market, cultivating new and existing partnerships, and aligning with internal leadership to identify innovations required to enhance UBC’s position in the market.
As market dynamics change, Brett is focused 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 the acquisition of key data, 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.
SVP, Innovation & Strategic Solutions
Allison Rutkowski, MS, MBA, is the Senior Vice President of Operations Excellence at UBC. In her role, she utilizes over 20 years of project management and clinical operations expertise to evolve UBC’s operational functions and develop key organizational strategies.
Allison helps drive constant improvement at UBC by overseeing business process management, process improvement, strategy execution, overall business operations, and project management. This includes UBC’s project management office (PMO) where she guides the development and implementation of project management standards, guidelines, and governance structures across all business segments.
Allison’s extensive industry experience includes senior leadership roles at Syneos Health and extensive research operations experience at INC Research. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Business Administration, Pharmaceutical Management from Rutgers, and a Master of Science, Biomedical Science from the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey.
SVP, Operations Excellence
Serving as UBC’s Senior Vice President & Head of Patient Access Services, Nicole Hebbert is responsible for all Patient Access 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, access channel, and supply chain considerations. These considerations include approaches for drug delivery that optimize patient access, consider alternate sites of care, and anticipate payer coverage dynamics of the product, as well as prescriber and patient-centered needs.
With over 30 years leading Specialty Pharmacy and Pharma Services teams, Nicole brings 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.
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, Nicole and her team untangle the dynamic challenges of access, affordability, and adherence.
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 various 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 Head of Evidence Development Solutions for UBC. In this role, he leads a multi-disciplinary team that designs and executes modernized solutions leveraging forward-leaning technology and research designs that deliver fit-for-purpose evidence on the safety and effectiveness of treatments for patients.
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 technology architectures and decentralized research solutions to drive greater insight into the safety profile and value proposition of medicines.
Head of Evidence Development Solutions
Natalie O’Donnell, BSN, RN, is the Senior Vice President responsible for UBC’s Safety & Risk Management services. She is a highly experienced and dedicated Registered Nurse (RN) with a passion for patient safety and public health. As the Head of Safety and Risk Management at UBC, Natalie plays a critical role in ensuring the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical products. This includes pharmacovigilance, REMS, RMPs, and Safety & Epidemiology consulting.
Mrs. O’Donnell’s background includes more than 20 years of healthcare and clinical research experience and she has worked in risk management for the last 12 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 also spent 2 years as an 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.
Prior to joining UBC, Natalie held key positions in pharmaceutical services, where she honed her expertise in adverse event reporting, risk assessment, and REMS. Her contributions have been instrumental in shaping industry best practices.
In her current role at UBC, Natalie leads a team of talented professionals and oversees the design and implementation of robust pharmacovigilance and risk management strategies. 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
With a passion for patient-centric healthcare, Natalie continues to drive excellence and ensure that patient safety remains at the heart of UBC’s mission.
Mrs. O’Donnell received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Misericordia University in northeastern Pennsylvania followed by her Program Management Certificate from Villanova University, also in Pennsylvania.
Head of Safety & Risk Management