 Photo: Hugh O'Brien |
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Surfer-turned-scientist Associate Professor Karen Woolley has proved you can be globally successful in a knowledge-intensive industry while living and working in regional Queensland...but you have to think laterally.
Karen is co-founder with husband Mark of ProScribe Medical Communications, the first and only Australian medical writing company to win six-figure overseas contracts and be recognised by leading international medical journals. Based in Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, ProScribe is also the first Australian company to be recognised internationally as complying with Good Publication Practice.
Karen leads a team of PhD medical writers with 10 staff based in Noosa, Sydney, Melbourne and Tokyo who service leading pharmaceutical, biotech and academic clients across the globe, including the world’s largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Karen said that competing on a global stage in the internet age requires a commitment to research and development (R&D) and lateral thinking with marketing.
"In the knowledge-based industry sector, it is not enough to possess knowledge, you have to create knowledge and the way to do that is though R&D," Karen said.
She also believes companies have to go beyond the ‘letter-box drop mentality’ to get overseas business. "Our company could take a booth at a US pharmaceutical convention and be one of 500 vying for attention or we could do what we do - invest our own money in R&D, get it published and then be invited to speak at that same convention," she said.
Karen, an invited speaker in Atlanta in June at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association, said that before globalism, you could settle for being the best in your state or country, but now the bar has been raised and you owe it to your clients to be on par with the best in the world.
"The tourism slogan for Queensland was once ‘Beautiful one day, perfect the next’ but now our business attitude has to be ‘Beautiful one day, brilliant the next’," she said.
Born in Canberra, Karen spent her early high school years in Washington DC where her father was in the Australian Embassy. He retired to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Karen completed school at Maroochydore State High and fell in love with surfing. She was good enough to win the Australian Intervarsity Surfing Championship in 1983 and to be offered a place on the world amateur surfing tour. But at the University of Queensland she became fascinated with cadavers and what makes a human body healthy.
"Almost overnight, I turned from surfer chick to science nerd!" she said.
After completing her PhD (Medical Science) at McMaster University in Canada, Karen worked as clinical research manager for two international pharmaceutical companies, managing clinical trials across different phases, therapeutic areas and countries. In 2000, she and husband Mark, himself a highly experienced medical writer and clinical researcher, moved their two children to Noosa and established ProScribe.
Karen said up to two-thirds of medical research is never published, mainly because doctors and scientists have limited time or writing expertise. "A researcher’s job is not finished until they’ve published their work and they have an ethical and scientific obligation to do so," Karen said.
Karen said the Queensland Smart State strategy has been most helpful in terms of actual programs that encourage business and in helping to dismantle the reputation that Queensland was ‘Hicksville when it came to matters of the mind.’
"The only way to fight that perception is to take the offensive and that’s what Smart State has done with investment in people and facilities and schemes," she said.
ProScribe received a QIDS (Queensland Industry Development Scheme) Grant from the Queensland Department of State Development in 2004/05 to develop medical writing opportunities in Japan.
An Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Karen is the first Queenslander to head the Board of the Association of Regulatory and Clinical Scientists and is also a Director of the Innovation Centre, a high-tech business incubator at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She was Queensland’s Westpac Business Owner of the Year in the 2004/05 Telstra Business Women of the Year Awards.
http://www.proscribe.com.auLast reviewed 3 April 2007