Associate Director, Preclinical Pharmacology, Fertility

Work Your Magic with us! Start your next chapter and join EMD Serono.

Ready to explore, break barriers, and discover more? We know you've got big plans - so do we! Our colleagues across the globe love innovating with science and technology to enrich people's lives with our solutions in Healthcare, Life Science, and Electronics. Together, we dream big and are passionate about caring for our rich mix of people, customers, patients, and planet.

That's why we are always looking for curious minds that see themselves imagining the unimaginable with us.

United As One for Patients, our purpose in Healthcare is to help create, improve and prolong lives. We develop medicines, intelligent devices and innovative technologies in therapeutic areas such as Oncology, Neurology and Fertility. Our teams work together across 6 continents with passion and relentless curiosity in order to help patients at every stage of life. Joining our Healthcare team is becoming part of a diverse, inclusive and flexible working culture, presenting great opportunities for personal development and career advancement across the globe.

This role does not offer sponsorship for work authorization. External applicants must be eligible to work in the US.

Your Role:
The Associate Director, Preclinical Pharmacology (reporting to the Head of Preclinical Pharmacology, Research Unit Neuroscience & I&I) serves as the scientific and operational lead for in vivo pharmacology across the Fertility asset portfolio, with cross-disciplinary contributions to Immunology & Inflammation (I&I) and Neuroscience programs. Working within a cross functional project team, you will lead multiple, high-priority fertility programs, accountable for designing, executing, and interpreting in vitro and in vivo studies that drive candidate selection, dose regimen design, and translational strategy, ultimately contributing to IND-enabling packages and regulatory submissions.

Location:

Hybrid - 3x/week onsite in Billerica, MA required.

• Design, execute, and interpret pharmacology studies supporting GPCR small-molecule agonist and allosteric modulator programs across multiple species.
• Develop and validate reproductive endocrine models including superovulation, folliculogenesis, luteinisation, corpus luteum maintenance, and/or testicular steroidogenesis.
• Establish pharmacodynamic readouts (LH surge, estradiol, progesterone, inhibin B, AMH) and integrate findings with PK/PD modelling teams to define exposure-response relationships.
• Define and execute IND-enabling pharmacology packages; author pharmacology sections of regulatory submissions and contribute to safety pharmacology strategies.
• Drive mechanistic understanding of biased agonism and receptor desensitisation/downregulation in reproductive tissues to inform candidate selection.

• Serve as co-project lead for the Fertility asset portfolio within cross-functional project teams (Medicinal Chemistry, DMPK, Clinical Pharmacology, Safety, etc).
• Author and review scientific documents including pharmacology summaries, target validation reports, and pre-IND briefings.
• Manage relationships with academic KOLs and reproductive biology CROs; oversee outsourced study design, execution, and data quality.
• Define and track in vivo pharmacology KPIs, study timelines, and quality indicators to ensure program milestones are met on schedule.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Reproductive Biology, Endocrinology, Pharmacology, Physiology, or Neuroendocrinology 8+ years of drug discovery experience, with at least 5+ years in a pharmaceutical or biotech industry setting.
• Proven track record as an in vivo pharmacology workstream lead on a cross-functional drug discovery…