Learning and Teaching Go Hand in Hand for Regulatory Science Professor
Published January 30, 2025
Johns Hopkins alum and now adjunct faculty member Anne Hansen is not afraid to take risks, face failures, or ask questions, three valuable things that she hopes to teach to her 11-year-old son and six-year-old daughter and the master’s students enrolled in her Clinical Trial Design and Conduct class in the JHU MS in Regulatory Science program from which she graduated in December of 2022.
Armed with a Spanish degree and a lot of undergraduate science, she found her way into the biotechnology field with a Contract Research Organization as a Clinical Trials Associate right out of the University of California, Davis. It seemed like a natural fit for the Los Altos, Ca. native, born and raised among tech titans in Silicon Valley. She spent the next 20 years climbing the biotech ranks, including stints at start-up companies and a ten-year turn with industry leader Genentech. There, she monitored and oversaw clinical cardiovascular, women’s health, and ophthalmology trials, including the successful launch of a drug that reverses the effect of age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease that can cause blindness. She then made a lateral move at Genentech into Clinical Data Management where she helped manage the data emerging from myriad clinical trials.
“Biotech companies are high risk. It is the nature of the beast,” Hansen said. “Getting a drug successfully to market is a one-billion-dollar proposition, and a lot of the drugs just don’t work. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of drugs that I have worked on that have never gone to market. You might get to phase two of a clinical trial where you are testing in patients with the disease, and the drug isn’t performing better than the placebo, and then it is game over. Once the results are bad, the funding just dries up, and the company goes under.”
It wasn’t until 2017, however, that Hansen decided to enroll in the Johns Hopkins program. Part-way through the program and while still working full-time, she took a leave of absence to give birth to her daughter.
“When I started the program, I didn’t tell anyone because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make it through,” Hansen said. “But then I just took one class at a time, and I enjoyed learning what I was learning so much. The Johns Hopkins Regulatory Science program provided the best academic experience I have ever had. It provided the flexibility that I needed to continue working and to be a mother, and truly having children motivated me to be better and go for it. I especially liked the program because I was learning things that I could use in my job. I never felt like it was a waste of time. The program helped fill educational gaps that I was missing. I learned things about food and drug law that were really interesting and that I would never have learned otherwise. The people were super nice, and I was able to take one class per semester. It was the best decision I made – to take my time, to keep balance in my life, and to manage the financial aspect of pursuing the degree.”
In May of 2023, and with her proud mother in the Baltimore audience watching her collect her diploma, she posed a question to her adviser, Dr. Jim Coker, about teaching.
“I was completing my electives and out of the blue I decided to ask Jim about how someone gets involved in teaching,” she said. “Much to my surprise, he responded very quickly. It was all about asking the question and being in the right place at the right time.”
Hansen began teaching at Johns Hopkins in the summer session of 2023, a feat that has cemented her forties as her best decade of personal and professional growth.
“I am so grateful to Jim Coker for taking a chance on me,” she said. “I truly feel like teaching makes me more confident in my own job, and that the teaching and working feed off one another. Where so many people get lost in the weeds, I now see things more clearly from a bird’s eye view. The degree gave me a lot more confidence in my work, and I understand how things fit together better. I can speak to regulations better and the ‘why’ behind what we do. I also think to be really good at teaching this class, I need to keep working. I get so much great material from my co-workers, who are experts in their departments. I can do research and infuse this information into my lectures. I want my students to really learn things that will translate into their jobs. I want to make my classes the best that I can so that the students feel it is a really good use of their time and resources. Having been a student in the program, I am very mindful of that.”
Though no longer at Genentech, Hansen has remained involved with a number of start-up companies over the past five years and is getting ready to start a phase two study in ulcerative colitis.
“I have been fortunate to have followed an amazing group of people into our third company and have found this great niche as the head of Clinical Data Management,” she said. “It is really exciting to work on clinical trials. To be involved with drugs that have the potential to make such an impact is very motivating, and it is gratifying to be able to say that this work you are doing can improve someone’s life. That is why I would tell anyone who is doing drug development to look into the Johns Hopkins program. The classes are broad, and students can select three electives in areas of interest to them or that are relevant to their job. Whether you are in the lab or out doing operational stuff like me, you can really benefit from this program. The fact that I was able to be in California and attend an amazing school like Johns Hopkins from my home just blows my mind. Johns Hopkins has been so, so good to me, and I am so grateful. I would encourage anyone to get into biotechnology. It is such a great industry to be in.”
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