Yanyun Shen

Business leader, Concerned citizen, Explorer, Parent

I am a pharmaceutical professional and have been in managment position for six years. I am currently a site head for statistical programming & analysis group in Roche Asia Pacific site (located in Shanghai). I received my medical degeree from Shanghai Second Medical University (a univerisity now part of Jiao Tong University) and masters degree in Epidemiology from University of Illinois at Chicago. After graduation, I have been working in various Pharmaceuticals companies for almost 20 years. I have worked in both SAS programming and drug safety surveilance areas. During the last six years, I have been in management positions and have managed various group from both US and China.

I am passionate about developing people by coaching them and bringing out their strengths and helping them see their potentials and building confidence to meet various challenges in their career.

Nowdays, with the wide availability of internet access, it has literally changed people's life style in the whole world. People can literally do everything at home. They can shop for anything including shop for anything including food, take classes, chat online, read, watch TV show, movies, listen to music. There is not a thing that internet can't seem to potentially provide. To me, what so scared about this is the loss of real physical connection between people. With more of more people being singles in their 20s and 30s years of age, in addtion to the mindset change (most peole don't feel marriage is absolutely the destiny), I feel it could also be due to the lack of f2f connection between people. In China, the most popular program on TV is the match making show. Those who are eager to find a mate are posting their personal profile and mate selection criteria to the public. You will realize that actually there are not many successful match making within 15 minutes.

clinical trials in drug development, medical science, People management, Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) programming

After living in US for 20 years, I decided to come back to my home country to contribute to the drug develoment in China while there is this opportunity in my current company. I thought since I was born in Shanghai and lived in Shanghai for 25 years, I will not have a problem living in Shanghai agian. In addition, I also thought my daughters (who were born in US) will get used to the life style in Shanghai too as they have been visiting Shanghai a lot of times. To my surprise, after i started to live in Shanghai, I found it really hard for me to adapt to the environment where I was brought up with. I kept asking myself how can it be? The more I live in Shanghai, the more I realize that I have truely been westernized myself as wel as my daughters. This shows that there is such a big cultural difference between western society and China. And I start to believe that culture has such a deep root and big impact to people's life no matter how open a nation would like to be.

I am a quick learner and think very quickly. When most of the people are trying to uderstand the first step, I probably already move to the 2nd step. I would like to challenge the status quo