Volunteer Profile: Trish Melton, PhD, Guidance Documents Committee Immediate past Chair

A member of ISPE since 1997, Melton led the team that wrote the ISPE Good Practice Guide: Project Management for the Pharmaceutical Industry and is mentoring the team working on a guidance document about sustainability. In addition to her volunteer work with ISPE, she currently serves as the Chair of the Institution of Chemical Engineers Sustainability Hub.

Melton holds a Doctor of Philosophy in chemistry, a Master of Business Administration, and a Master of Arts in Dance Education. Her research focus is on the development of tap dance teaching and learning and its link to music-making, somatic practices, and the history and culture of tap dance. She is currently a doctoral candidate in tap dance pedagogy at Coventry University in England and runs Tap Team Ireland, a tap dance team that competes in international competitions.

How did you become interested in working in the pharmaceutical industry?

My first degree was in chemical engineering. For my PhD, I began looking at applications of aerosols and how we can target where the aerosol goes, specifically for respiratory diseases, and that really piqued my interest. It made me realize how much science was connected to people and solving the problems they were facing. I decided I wanted to go into the pharmaceutical industry because there are always big problems to solve, and I wanted to be involved in solving them and was excited to do something that changes people’s lives for the better.

What was your first job out of college?

I lectured for a few years, but my first job in the pharmaceutical industry was with Eli Lilly in Liverpool as a process/project engineer. It was real baptism of fire because I was working on the manufacturing side, but I was also helping develop the drug. So, I was doing manufacturing support, looking at the drug development, and looking at the quality implications of things we were scaling up. It was a drug that needed a lot of development, and I was there at the right time to be involved in many different aspects of the entire drug development process. I also started to get involved with how we document and send information to regulators for approval. I got my first taste of real cross-functional teams because I was working with quality professionals, regulatory professionals, scientists, engineers, and operators.

Tell me about your current role.

I get to do what I love: solve problems for a living. It’s been exciting because I work for large and small pharmaceutical companies and their suppliers, looking at problems. Sometimes it is setting up a new project, sometimes it is looking at a tricky project, sometimes it is how we talk about this to our regulators. Because I have the quality and project management background and am an engineer, I can play a lot of different roles, whether it is running a Lean Six Sigma project or a new facility project, for example.

Now, in addition to process improvements, I’m also doing a lot of work with sustainability. That’s become a big part of my role. Organizations are trying to determine how to incorporate sustainability into their strategy and daily operations; not just thinking about today, but also about tomorrow and next year.

How has your volunteer work with ISPE benefited you?

I think the most important volunteer position I’ve had has been chairing and being a member of the Guidance Documents Committee (GDC). In this committee, we look at what knowledge members need by examining industry best practices and current hot topics. We’ve got experts from across the industry who volunteer their time to say, “That’s good. We need to look at that.” I’ve written many guides, presented at conferences, and done a lot of different volunteer work for ISPE, but I think the most satisfying has been working with the GDC and Publications Department. It has been great to find a group of like-minded, curious people.