Liz Shanahan

Speaker

Liz Shanahan is recognised as a global leader in Healthcare and Lifesciences. An extremely experienced, C-suite executive, with deep management and communications consultancy expertise. An eminent speaker and serial entrepreneur, Liz sold her first business, a specialist healthcare & LifeScience communication consultancy, to the management consultancy, FTI, where she then became Global Head of Healthcare & Lifesciences for a number of years. On exiting, she has continued to develop and become involved in a number of businesses and holds a number of NEDs. As one of the sector’s most experienced counsels she continues to advise CEOs in many of the world’s leading organizations. Her clients have included the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, the NHS, GSK, Boots, Pfizer and Novartis.

Expertise

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Liz has over 25 years’ experience working in and with the Pharmaceutical Industry. She began her career at Merck & Co Inc as a medical representative, before moving into the Public Affairs Department, where she ran a number of high profile disease and product programs.

For the last few years, Liz has been advising senior leaders in healthcare & lifescience organisations who are grappling with rapidly changing, unpredictable and ever-complex environments. She helps them work through their most complex organisational, brand, market access and partnership challenges, aligning them to patient and market needs. She is also an angel investor in a variety of start-up & scale up pharmaceutical and health-tech businesses, including Exploristics, MPX Bioceuticals and One Touch Health, where she provides strategic support. Liz has strong leadership skills; a track record of business success; an enviable network across healthcare & life sciences from her involvement with the World Economic Forum, the Global Irish Network, the Irish International Business Network, which she chaired from 2014-2016, the British Council, where she sat on the Chair, Sir Vernon Ellis’s Provocation Board and Darden School of Business.

Until 2014, Liz was Global Head & Senior Managing Director of the Healthcare & Lifesciences Communications business at the NYSE listed management consultancy, FTI Consulting. The business worked with the global, European & US divisions of numerous FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 healthcare & LifeScience companies, supporting them with their corporate, marketing, scientific, medical, brand, R&D and internal as well as external engagement strategies. She was also a Strategic Lead of the $210m Healthcare & Lifesciences business spanning Restructuring, Economic Consulting, Corporate Finance and Communications, where she developed a major new cross segment business for the corporation. During her time at FTI, she was appointed to lead the company’s World Economic Forum programme and she was also a member of the Global Business Leadership in the strategic communications segment. She supported numerous other non-healthcare teams, including banking, who were keen to learn from the pharmaceutical industry’s experiences with business ethics. This followed the acquisition of the business she founded, Santé Communications in 2007, after 12 years as one of the world’s leading healthcare communications consultancies. The business was proud to have 18 of the top 20 pharmaceutical corporations as clients, including GE, Pfizer, GSK, UCB, Novo Nordisk, Shire & Novartis.

Liz has a degree in Computer Programming & Maths from University College Cork, Ireland and she is an alumnus of the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business.

Liz is currently a non-executive Director of Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. She was recently highlighted by the Irish Times as one of Irelands most significant global leaders in Healthcare & Life-sciences and as a Sci-Tech leader worldwide by Silicon Republic. Liz is an Irish national living in London.