Executive Director, Global Content Operations
Avery Levine works as an Executive Director of Global Content Operations at Norstella. As a data guru, Avery thrives in the world of analysis and insights, working with a variety of clients to ensure that they have a pulse on the market and can therefore make informed decisions in the pharma industry. Avery has been with the company for nearly a decade and is excited about the growth of our end-to-end solutions.
Tell us a little bit more about your role.
I live in data operations, which is the backend, non-flashy part of Norstella. This includes all the analyst, journalist and consultant demographics that make up how we author all the content that we use to solve problems for clients. So, it’s the domain knowledge subject matter experts (SMEs), all the people that start with data and then roll it up to analysis and then roll it up one level further to insights. That’s where the value is for our clients. That’s where we solve problems. Data by itself is not useful; it’s just things in a box. The ‘so what?’ and the ‘why?’ factor is useful and that is where we engage with clients to figure out how we bridge between the data and the specific problem that we’re trying to solve.
How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?
I joined the company a lifetime ago, what feels like eight or nine years. I knocked around various parts of Norstella, from operations to consulting. I joined as one of those domain knowledge SMEs and then I decided it was much more fun to run around having the more holistic conversations that happen at a business level. These days, I sit over a few teams that feed into all the products that we commercialize within the market.
What does your day-to-day usually look like?
My day-to-day is a lot of calls and PowerPoint slides, but the vast majority of us who live in operations spend our time authoring data, meeting clients, writing white papers, attending conferences, and doing high-level, trending / analysis. Everything that we do comes down to data and what we can layer on top of it to really derive value for clients. So, it’s a lot of keeping a pulse check on the public domain. What modalities are hot at a particular conference? What R&D is being funded? What investor conferences are going on? What M&A is underfoot? It’s all about trends in the wider life science sector and deriving takeaways off the back that we can put in front of clients.
What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?
We’re delivering projects for some rather big clients these days. We’re doing a lot of work in the competitive intelligence space, so things like real-time event monitoring alerts and being able to have line of sight to where somebody happens to play in a particular corner of the sandbox. What are the dependencies? What is the overlap? What are the movers and shakers that are going on in that space? That’s more at a project level.
At a program level, one of the largest transformation programs underfoot right now in our modest perch of operations is that everybody wants to do bridging these days. Everybody wants to do master data management. Everybody wants to work with enterprise-level data, which then should be possible to roll up with other proprietary or client in-house data, marry it up, and interconnect data points to arrive at those wider insights. So, one of the things that we’re doing internally is putting together an enterprise-level data lake that is the first of its kind for the wider industry. We’re effectively making sure that there are as few friction points as possible for how clients are able to interface with the data we sit over.
What are some of the common challenges of your role?
My job involves a lot of stakeholder wrangling, a lot of getting people on the same page, a lot of baselining, and a lot of making sure we’re calibrated – that this is the same direction in everybody’s mind. It also comes down to the challenges of working with a lot of enterprise-level data. One of the core tenets that we live by is that more is not always better. Just because you have five drug records rather than three, you don’t get a gold star – two of those could be dupes if you didn’t take the time to have a domain knowledge SME look at it and say, “Hey, this is actually the same R&D platform as something else under a different lab code.” So, we really want to make sure that we leverage both our tech and our people to arrive at a dataset that has fidelity to it rather than simply volumes. That’s the challenge. As you build, how do you not dilute what you end up with? We’re very careful not to do that.
What’s been your career highlight to date?
What I do now. We were formed about a year and a half to two years ago, off the back of a few mergers, and with that comes an opportunity to have market relevant in a larger sandbox, if only because we have access to datasets and expertise that we didn’t necessarily have before – or at least not at scale. So, that’s the opportunity: how we build off the back of that and make what we have more and more relevant for clients. That’s the fun part of my job and that’s what I get to do now.
What trends are you seeing across the industry right now that Norstella is in a unique position to help with?
There’s more and more end-to-end integration. Clin ops personas, for example, are starting to look more at protocols as a variable in their overall trial and regulatory planning. You also have companies at the other end looking at label expansions and commercialization strategies for drugs that are near approval. All this requires a holistic, end-to-end assessment. You’re not able to tackle it just by looking at one segment of the patient-to-pipeline funnel, which is a sentiment very in-line with the overall mission statement of Norstella. So, the greater vertical integration of pharma as an industry is a trend that we’re seeing more and more of.
It’s exciting for me because when I this about how we leverage Operations, the place where we overlap the most with other parts of the business is in Technology. We’re now able to bring to bear a more mature and genAI-led tech stack, now that we are more adept at tackling some of these questions that surface as people do end-to-end analysis. Which is exciting, because it means that the opportunity dovetails with the trend.
Which company principle resonates most with you?
The one that resonates the most is the one on integrity. This comes back to what I was talking about in terms of data fidelity. I live in data, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to have more data. That’s never the challenge. The challenge is having the right data, and the way that you bridge the gap between “more data” and “right data” ultimately just comes down to integrity. How do you genuinely ensure that you bring robust enough domain expertise, that you bring a developed enough tech stack, and that both overlap in a way that the dataset that we finally end up surfacing to clients is one we have confidence in? As with everything that we do, not just as a Norstella but as a wider life science sector, it needs to be in the service of patients and in the service of getting medicines faster to clients at the other end. I see a pretty direct lineage between that and integrity.
What would you tell someone just starting their career with Norstella?
There’s a lot of Norstella out there, so take your time. The challenge with all of us as we step into new playgrounds is we only know what we know. We do so much across datasets – real-world to clinical to commercial to all steps in between – and they could be surfaced a thousand and one different ways. Everything from syndicated products to ad hoc, custom bespoke consulting offerings. So, my advice would be to take your time to know what you are good at, to specialize in that, and to use that as a stepping-stone for travels from there. There’s a lot to learn and that’s the exciting part.
Where do you see Norstella in the next year or two?
I see us being able to service the full stack of client needs. What I mean by that is now that we are a larger company, we have the expertise and the credibility to stand up and say that we don’t need to cherry pick which part of the value chain of solutions we have the greatest strength in. Instead, there’s much more gradient to the conversation and we are better able to service every aspect of the value chain for clients. This is what I see Norstella stepping into as we mature as a company and as we grow from here. A one-stop shop. The breadth of data that we have, the expertise that we have, and the tooling from a tech stack perspective that we have – it’s all something that we can bring to bear at a scale that we didn’t before.
What do you like most about working at Norstella?
Usually anytime you talk to somebody who has been at a place for multiple years, some aspect of their answer always touches on the people, because this is where we spend most of our time. We are the company we keep. I really haven’t met a more committed and knowledgeable batch of people as those who currently make up my team and the wider Norstella. Part of what actually drives us to wake up in the morning and engage with this little world of corporate is our travels with the people that we spend eight-plus hours a day with. The culture at Norstella is very much a selling point and that’s what drives me, at least, to consume way too much coffee in the morning, turn my brain on, and drink deep from emails.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I enjoy trail running these days. I took it up because my dog got a little bit larger and her legs grew a little bit longer and suddenly I have clients of my own at home who need to be serviced. I also do a lot of reading. I do a lot of sports, like archery and fencing. Anything that lets me have a bit of a breather on the side of the sometimes the pell-mell world that we live in and just take time to be in my head and recharge, which running, sports, or reading lets you do.
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