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Rosa Poetes

PartnerZurich

Focuses on helping global pharmaceutical and medical product companies, chemical companies, and packaged goods companies achieve excellence in their R&D and commercial operations to achieve innovation-driven growth

Rosa is one of the leaders in McKinsey’s Pharmaceuticals & Medical Products Practice. Since joining McKinsey, she has built deep expertise across a broad range of topics, in particular R&D, corporate- and business-unit strategy, growth strategy, and organizational, culture, and capability topics.

Rosa brings her passion for science, innovation, and scientific advancement to help pharmaceutical and medical product companies shape the future of R&D and bring innovative products to market. She has worked extensively across development functions—particularly regarding innovation and product acceleration projects. In addition to her deep functional expertise in development—regulatory affairs, clinical operations, and chemicals, manufacturing, and control—Rosa brings strong end-to-end experience.

In addition, Rosa has extensive experience working to improve value creation at the interface of R&D and commercial through product strategy work, pipeline and portfolio strategy assessments, life-cycle improvements, and launch excellence, including market access considerations.

Outside the pharmaceutical industry, Rosa has worked on business unit strategy, growth and-innovation strategy topics, and organizational design.

Published work

Beyond the pandemic: The next chapter of innovation in vaccines,” McKinsey & Company, May 2024

Getting strategic about new-product submissions in the pharma industry,” McKinsey & Company, September 2021

Fast-forward: Will the speed of COVID-19 vaccine development reset industry norms?” McKinsey & Company, May 2021

EDUCATION

University of Cambridge
PhD, physics

Princeton University
BA, physics