|  SPEAKER  •  Deborah Donovan, Takeda

Debbie Donovan is Senior Vice President for Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) at Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. She has global responsibility for the development and implementation of environment, health and safety programs, processes and governance mechanisms as well as defining the sustainability strategy for the company. Debbie brings to this role deep knowledge and passion for the EHS field with over 30 years of experience across the pharmaceutical, petrochemical and refining industries.

While at Takeda, Debbie has established the organization’s Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) prevention program which targets SIF potential exposures. She has championed the development and rolled out safety leadership training specifically targeting site leadership teams and the operations management teams. Debbie has been an advocate for and sponsored the developed the EHS IT platform for the legacy Shire organization and is leading the integration into the legacy Takeda organization with a target to complete in early 2021. Under Debbie’s tenure, the legacy Shire organization achieved group certification to ISO14001 and ISO45001 for manufacturing operations with a goal to extend to legacy Takeda operations by 2021. Debbie has led the integration planning and execution of the EHS function
with the acquisition of Baxalta by Shire and the acquisition of Shire by Takeda.

Prior to joining Takeda in 2015, Debbie served as the Head of Environment, Health, Safety and Business Continuity (EHS & BC) for Novartis Group where she was responsible for the implementation of programs within the Pharmaceutical Division (28 manufacturing sites and over 70 country offices across the globe). During her tenure, she led the development and implementation of a cross-divisional EHS IT strategy, chemical regulatory affairs strategy, EHS public affairs engagement strategy and third-party auditing strategy on behalf of Novartis Group as well as developed a risk management platform for EHS & BC risk that was later adopted company-wide.
 

Prior to Novartis, Debbie served in a variety of roles for Amgen, Inc. including Director of EHS, Director of Maintenance and Director of Risk Management. Additionally, Debbie has held roles of increasing responsibility at both site and corporate levels at Sunoco Inc., Ashland Chemical Company and Texas Instruments.

Debbie graduated from Northeastern University with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering and has received an MBA from California State University. She resides in Rhode Island with her husband and has four children.