Leaders & Legends

Beginning his career with a geology degree and a job drilling oil wells in remote corners of the world, Alistair Macdonald, Chief Executive Officer of Worldwide Clinical Trials, took an unplanned route to the top of the CRO industry. In this candid conversation, he and Patty explore what shapes a leader, and how the people you work alongside can define the way you lead for decades to come. 

You will hear Alistair reflect on what it takes to build a culture that performs, how the relationship between Sponsors and CROs has shifted over the years, and why serving emerging biotechs calls for a different kind of partnership. Along the way, he opens up about stepping away from the industry and what ultimately drew him back. This episode explores the human side of running a CRO, and why trust and relationships remain at the core of clinical research. 

Roy Baynes spent the first quarter of his career as a physician scientist — training in hematology, oncology, and stem cell transplantation, and eventually leading the bone marrow transplantation service at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit. The second quarter he spent in industry, holding senior clinical development leadership roles at Amgen and Gilead before joining Merck in 2013, where he served as Chief Medical Officer and head of global clinical development for nearly a decade.

In this episode, Patty sits down with Roy — now Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Eikon Therapeutics — to talk about what drove that career and what he learned along the way. They cover the leadership principles behind more than 140 medicine and vaccine approvals at Merck, including Keytruda®; how Roy and Roger Perlmutter rebuilt Merck's clinical development organization from the ground up while simultaneously racing to develop what would become the best-selling cancer drug in the world; what it actually takes to build teams that execute at that scale; and how to know when to double down on a drug program versus change course. Roy also talks about what drew him out of retirement to join Eikon, and why — after fifty years — the work still feels urgent.

The through line: focus on the patient, and the rest tends to follow.

Craig Mooney almost became a history teacher. But a scheduling change on a summer job sent him to G.H. Besselaar Associates instead — what he'd call the first international CRO — and that accidental entry point put him in the room with the people who seeded the clinical trials industry.

From there, Craig spent three decades building one of the deepest bodies of expertise in Interactive Response Technology. He came up through the early IVRS days when the technology was barely understood, saw the supply chain and logistics side of the business up close at Fisher Clinical Services, moved to the sponsor side at Bristol Myers Squibb — where an MHRA inspection became a turning point not just for his career but for how the industry thought about IRT compliance — and eventually founded IRT Advisors Group to work without the constraints of any single organization's commercial interests.

In this episode, Patty and Craig trace a career built entirely within a niche that most people in clinical trials couldn't fully explain. They talk about what IRT actually changed about how studies are designed and executed, what the industry got wrong about compliance for years and what it took to fix it, and what it looks like to spend 30 years going deeper into one area rather than broader.

Kathy Bradrick, grew up watching her father run an independent pharmacy — nights, weekends, calls in the middle of the night. And although she wanted nothing to do with her father's business, she was inspired by his drive and work ethic and always knew she wanted to build something of her own.

In this episode, Patty and Kathy trace a career that started with a blind newspaper ad in the early 90s, ran through the startup years of the CRO industry, and led Kathy to co-found her first company in 2013 before eventually launching Spark Clinical Research. Along the way, they talk about what it takes to build a company twice, what the current funding environment means for clinical research sites, and why challenge and opportunity tend to arrive together.

In Part 2 of his Leaders & Legends conversation, Ken Hyatt — Partner and Co-Founder of CMPartners and Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Global Restoration Institute — walks Patty through the leadership framework he has developed over four decades of work in negotiation and organizational leadership.

Ken argues that the world has grown harder than the one most leadership models were built for, and offers a practitioner's framework in response, built around what he deliberately calls practices rather than skills. He and Patty go deep on leading Self (the three Rs of Reflecting, Regulating, and Refreshing, and the science of cognitive reserve) and leading Others (Communicating, Engaging Conflict, Connecting, and Co-creating). The conversation closes with Ken's perspective on the most common negotiation mistakes he sees, and how he stays motivated in difficult times.

If you missed Part 1, where Ken traces the career that shaped this framework, we recommend starting there.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Patty sits down with Ken Hyatt — Partner & Co-Founder of CMPartners and Executive Director & Co-Founder of the Global Restoration Institute (GRI) — to trace a career spent at the front lines of negotiation, conflict, and leadership.

Ken takes us back to winter 1981, when he was in law school with Roger Fisher, reading Getting to Yes in manuscript form and watching his mentor advise on the Iranian hostage crisis in real time. From there, his path runs through Bain & Company, two decades building the modern negotiation field at CMPartners and the Harvard Negotiation Project, a turn as COO of the US International Trade Administration, and now into the work he's doing through GRI — helping leaders, governments, and societies address the wounds of the past in places like Rwanda and the Middle East.

Along the way, Ken shares why managing conflict isn't the same as transforming it, why interpersonal relationships sit at the heart of organizational strategy, and how the toughest conversations often start not in the past, but in the future.

George Kramb, CEO and Founder of PatientPartner, shares the deeply personal story behind his company—a cancer diagnosis in his own family that revealed a critical gap in patient support. What started as a simple question ("Can I talk to someone who's been through this?") became the foundation for a platform connecting patients facing difficult healthcare decisions with mentors who've walked the same path.

George discusses how PatientPartner is transforming clinical trial recruitment and retention by fostering trust and relatability through peer-to-peer connections, his vision for true patient centricity where patients help build the protocols they'll participate in, and his goal to bridge the often-siloed clinical and commercial sides of pharma.

From his early days in orthopedic trauma sales to building a company around empathy and lived experience, George offers a founder's perspective on solving problems that matter and keeping patients at the center of innovation.

Patty sits down with Michelle Jones and Jeff Smith, co-producers of the Innovation Network Gathering, to discuss what it takes to design an in-person event that sparks meaningful change in clinical research. They share the origin story behind their “gathering, not conference” mindset, how they use dive teams and their new “Whale Tank” platform to create real dialogue between innovators and buyers, and why empathy and intentional design are at the core of every experience they build together.

Bari Kowal, Senior Vice President and Head of Development Operations & Portfolio Management at Regeneron, joins Patty to trace her career - beginning in early gene therapy in the 1990s, moving through CRO leadership at ICON and big pharma at Pfizer, and ultimately to a decade of building at Regeneron. She shares how “hands-on” biotech roots shaped her leadership style, why culture and founder-led focus still matter at scale, and how to turn Sponsor–CRO relationships into real partnerships. Bari also digs into data/AI’s impact on trial execution and the mindset shift from “wait and see” to “try, learn, and iterate”, all while keeping quality and patient safety non-negotiable. We wrap with a personal look at balance, family, and what keeps her energized outside of work.

CEO of Precision for Medicine, Margaret Keegan traces a refreshingly non-linear path from mathematician at the Bank of England to leadership across Glaxo, PPD, Quintiles/IQVIA, PRA, private equity, and now Precision Medicine Group. They unpack how CRO expertise became the engine of trial execution and where Functional Service Provider models help or entrench silos. Margaret shares a pragmatic view on regulation and AI, lessons for early-career professionals about following curiosity, and her goal to move Precision from a best-kept secret to the go-to partner in oncology and rare disease.