Susan Stipa was the Commercial Director for Biokinetics, later owned by Foster Wheeler. As part of Bill Brydges Executive Team, Susan ran the business development and marketing efforts for this global pharmaceutical engineering and construction firm. She initiated and was responsible for coordinating the first partnership offering a modular construction option, through an alliance with modular cleanroom manufacturer G-Con. Her push to pull the team more deeply into the ‘baby biotech’ business is where she and Dr. Barry Holtz, then CEO of GCon, first met.
Her chemical engineering career began as a process engineer for Roche, at the largest Vitamin C plant in the world at the time, later moving into rheological instrumentation, for Rheometrics, with a stint as Global Marketing Lead for world financing powerhouse, De Lage Landen out of the Netherlands.
Arriving at Foster Wheeler/Biokinetics, her work with Barry Holtz and Bill Brydges took this team to Wales, S. Africa and to the Pfizer PCMM project, before leaving to start her own communications firm for pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, the first of its kind in the United States.
McDay won multiple awards throughout its seven years, including the Emerald Ingenuity award and Best Pharmaceutical Communications & PR Agency in the Mid-Atlantic USA (Biotechnology 2020 Awards). After much searching for the perfect fit, McDay was acquired in 2020 by CGLife, a science communications firm out of Chicago and San Diego, where Susan remains responsible for the drug discovery, engineering and the manufacturing sectors out of the Philadelphia office.