Deborah Hartman

"No two days are quite the same," says Deborah Hartman, director of lead discovery in central nervous system and pain research at AstraZeneca in Wilmington, Del. Hartman, who started out as a bench scientist, is now a manager in charge of about 50 people working together on discovering new drugs for CNS disease targets.

"In this role, there's a mixture of scientific-, business-, and personnel-related activities," Hartman notes. She oversees everything from lab safety to budget management, but she is still a scientist at heart. "I no longer work in the lab myself, but I think my favorite part of the day is the opportunity to discuss results that have come out of the lab or catch up on scientific literature," she says.

Hartman's affinity for science dates back to her childhood. "Since I was a kid, I was very interested in science, everything from medicine to space exploration," she remembers. Because her high school didn't have a strong science program, she took physics and calculus courses at a local university during her senior year. She was admitted to Princeton as an undergraduate and then to Yale for a PhD in biology, where she focused on understanding the molecular basis of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor modulation in early events during synaptogenesis at the neuromuscular junction.

She had planned to become a professor, but in the last year of her studies, she was approached by Hoffmann-La Roche about an opening for a postdoc in Basel, Switzerland. "Many of my faculty advisors told me that I would be making a mistake by going into the pharmaceutical industry, but it seemed like it was worth trying something new," she recalls. "I decided to take the job, and 15 years later, I'm still in the pharmaceutical industry, and I have found that it is a very exciting place to be."

Hartman spent seven years at Roche before she moved to AstraZeneca to build the department she runs today. "I was the first and only member of the department," she recalls. "We've built basically a molecular pharmacology group that has additional responsibilities such as high-throughput screening, compound management, quite a bit of robotics and automation, as well as computational chemistry abilities."

In addition to her wide-ranging responsibilities as the head of that group, Hartman has found time to take action on one of the issues that means the most to her: opening up new opportunities for women and minorities. "Science is all about creativity, and we need to ensure that we have individuals from very different backgrounds and with very different ideas contributing not only in the lab but in management as well," she says.

Toward that end, she has been involved in an effort that spans AstraZeneca's global research and development sites to create workshops and other initiatives that foster awareness of issues affecting women and minorities in science. She is also working to build a women's network within the company.

At 41, Hartman is ambitious about the future and hopes to move up the ranks to an executive management position. Her time in Switzerland whetted her appetite for life abroad, and she'd like another position overseas one day. "I've traveled a lot in Asia, and looking at what's happening with respect to the economic growth there and the real commitment to life sciences emerging in countries such as Singapore and China, I'd certainly be interested in someday looking at setting up a research site for a pharmaceutical company there," she says.

-- Kate Fodor