Toft Group Expands Leadership Team
February 17, 2017 – Executive search firm Toft Group Executive Search has added Lucy Lu to its leadership team as senior vice president. She will support Toft Group’s entrepreneurial client base in northern California.
Ms. Lu previously served as chief commercial officer for iNDx Lifecare Inc., a point-of-care diagnostic startup, and SVP of corporate and business development at Crescendo Bioscience. She previously served as head of the U.S. chief technology office for Roche Diagnostics, based in California and Basel, Switzerland. Additionally, she held various life sciences marketing and product development positions at Roche Applied Sciences and PE Applied Biosystems (now Thermo Fisher Scientific). In her early career, she devoted 10 years to drug R&D at Genentech and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Ms. Lu is currently serving as a board member of Life Science Angels (LSA). She is also the chairperson of its member education program to provide LSA members with angel investment knowledge to build their investment portfolios.
“We are thrilled to have Lucy Lu as the newest member of our experienced team based in San Francisco,” said founder and CEO Robin Toft. “She brings 25-plus years of biotech industry experience to the role, having personally served in executive level positions for growing companies, including Roche Diagnostics, Crescendo Biosciences, and Genentech.”
“Lucy is incredibly skilled at building life science executive teams, and she represents an important addition to better serve our valued customers seeking top tier talent for their growth stage companies,” Ms. Toft added.
Life Sciences Recruiters Turning More Often to Outside Talent
As the life sciences sector continues to expand and reshape itself, organizations in the field are looking to renew and refresh their leadership ranks. In demand: multi-skilled executives who can effect change on many levels. These new captains of industry, according to recruiters, are younger, more intuitive and understand that what works today might not be what’s going to work tomorrow. Stepping up to the task are search consultants, recruiting well-rounded individuals who understand science as well as the dynamics of a transitioning industry ….. Here’s some further reading from Hunt Scanlon Media.
ESR Healthcare & Life Sciences Recruiting Special Issue
Hunt Scanlon Media has just released its latest installment of ESR – this one devoted to finding leaders for life sciences and healthcare organizations. Given the massive transformation occurring in these two sectors, everything in this issue likely applies to you. You’ll also find our first-ever Top 50 list of recruiters dedicated to this space.
With offices in San Francisco, San Diego and Boston, Toft Group Executive Search specializes in searches for organizations in biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, and diagnostics. The firm recently filled senior level roles for Fate Therapeutics, Agendia, OPKO Health, NanoString Technologies, and Mesa Biotech.
In recent months, Toft Group has seen a flurry of growth. It opened a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area to support customer demand. The new office is strategically situated in South San Francisco, among neighboring biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device, and digital health companies. “Our new location in the heart of one of the world’s top biotech communities aligns with our commitment to deliver higher quality candidates more quickly than other firms, thereby enabling our customers to commercialize their novel products faster for the benefit of patients worldwide,” said Ms. Toft.
According to recruiters, highly skilled candidates are in great demand throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, and they often receive multiple job offers with competitive compensation packages. As a result, there is growing demand for professional level candidates across the field.
This expansion follows the recent launch of the firm’s dedicated digital health & healthcare IT search practice, focused on executive and niche technical searches for digital health companies, including SaaS, PaaS, big data & analytics, mobile health, genomics, personalized medicine, patient engagement, population health management, and digital medical device companies.
Contributed by Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor, Hunt Scanlon Media
