Outstanding Women in Business: Smith is leading a major biopharma expansion

Photo | courtesy of Bristol Myers Squibb Odile Smith

Write a Comment

By Kevin Koczwara

The hardest part for Odile Smith when she joined as vice president and Devens campus lead for Bristol Myers Squibb, a biopharma firm with $50 billion in annual revenue, wasn’t the work.

“What was extremely difficult was the insertion on the private level,” she said.

It’s life that’s difficult, which is even harder when there’s a COVID pandemic, housing prices are skyrocketing and, like Smith, you don’t know much about Massachusetts outside of Boston. It’s packing up a life and trying to find a new one. It’s the small stuff that takes time.

Smith is responsible for not only the research at the 89-acre Bristol Myers Squibb campus, but also the safety of the more than 1,100 employees who work on the various research and manufacturing projects, as well as its connection to Devens. This includes at its new 244,000-square-foot building set to open next year, which is a major step in the company’s efforts to develop personalized cell therapy for cancer patients.

Smith joined Bristol Myers Squibb a year and a half ago from French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur, where she’d worked for more than 16 years, starting as an operations manager and working her way up to the head of biologics manufacturing.

Smith was born in the Champagne region of France. Her mother was a nurse and dad an engineer. The fourth of five kids, she devoured books and looked forward to the ones her mother would bring home when she got sick.

“When we were sick, I remember I loved it because my mom would always buy a new book because you're stuck in bed or something, so we had something to do,” Smith said.

In high school, her aptitude put her on the path to become an engineer.

“At my time in France, being an engineer was a very much promoted path for kids that are good in school, so I was kind of suggested to do that,” Smith said.

She saw the work her dad did building an oil platform and became interested in how this one natural resource from underground in the form of a dark sludge impacted so much of our everyday life. She decided to study chemical engineering. But, again, her career trajectory took a turn when she visited a pharmaceutical company as a student.

Smith graduated from Ecole Europeenne des Hautes Etudes des Industries Chimiques de Strasbourg, France and promptly went to graduate school at the Universite Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, getting her PhD in medical chemistry in 1992. But her first job out of college didn't have anything to do with the chemistry she studied. Instead, she was hired to join a team as a project engineer and was responsible for implementing a management system of enterprises.

Smith started to learn not from books but from people. She studied people, systems, and the inner-workings of corporate structures. Quickly, she rose up the ranks of various companies across five countries. She’s absorbed the information around her and now is in charge of leading Bristol Myers Squibb’s expansion in Devens and its push forward in the future of medical research.

While Smith has all the academic and professional tools on her resume, it’s her people skills that most impressed Carolyn Kelley, human resources senior director for cell therapy operations at Bristol Myers Squibb, when the company brought Smith in for interviews about the site head position at Devens.

“[She] is strong technically, zooming in and helping people solve problems” Kelley said. “She’s also personable and can zoom out, and she demonstrates that she cares about her employees.”

She has to juggle multiple jobs and personalities, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time to read books anymore. There’s no more setting and relaxing. Instead, she gets to absorb the stories of the people around her.

“I have life books around me,” Smith said. “I am surrounded by people. I never have one minute when I am alone during my day at work, and so, for me I think I have evolved a little bit of the learning through experiences. I've had so many jobs and worked in so many sites, so many countries, places, that automatically I have been exposed to a lot of cases … They are real life cases, and that's how I continue to learn.”