Pamela Coleman originally contemplated a career in medicine. She pursued a BS degree in chemical engineering at the University of Notre Dame because she wanted a degree that would give her the flexibility to fulfill some of her prerequisites for medical school. “However, as I continued in my engineering classes, I enjoyed the challenge of my course work and the satisfaction of finding technical solutions to difficult problems,” explains Coleman. “When I evaluated career options, the medical device industry seemed to be the best fit as it enabled me to fulfill my passions around medicine and engineering.”

 

During her senior year at Notre Dame, Johnson & Johnson recruiters came on campus to recruit for their new leadership development program targeting engineers for roles in their global operations business. The program included two-and-a-half years of engineering and operations roles across J&J’s medical, pharmaceutical, and consumer sectors.

 

Coleman was hired into the program and started with J&J as a line quality engineer in a surgical device manufacturing plant in 2006, after her graduation from Notre Dame. She went on to earn an MBA with a concentration in finance from Xavier University in 2013.

 

As a member of the leadership development program, Coleman rotated across three positions. First, she was a quality engineer responsible for quality assurance across surgical stapling manufacturing lines for Ethicon Endo-Surgery, one of J&J’s businesses. “I performed non-conformance root cause investigation and lean/process excellence manufacturing improvements,” she explains. Her second rotation placed her at J&J’s Ortho Clinical Diagnostics business as a manufacturing engineer, “where we manufactured blood diagnostic equipment.”

 

Her third and final rotation in the leadership development program placed her in a procurement role for pharmaceutical manufacturing for J&J’s global pharmaceutical supply chain organization. After graduating from the program, Coleman took positions across supplier quality engineering, complaint handling, quality systems management, and new product quality engineering management.

 

Coleman says that one reason she was drawn to J&J as an employer is the company’s diverse portfolio of businesses that would give her the opportunity to pursue different career paths while remaining within the same company.

 

Today, she is senior manager, quality engineering, and is responsible for ensuring that Ethicon’s Endocutter surgical stapling platform continues to deliver on new product launches in a safe, compliant, and efficacious manner. She manages nine quality engineers whose responsibilities include detecting and preventing defects at the earliest phase of product design. “I love that my group is ensuring safe, compliant, cutting-edge surgical technology,” notes Coleman. “The products we work on will directly save lives. We create the quality and design verification strategies to meet design reliability and fail-safe assurance. We translate unmet needs in the global healthcare market and design electro-mechanical devices to solve those needs.”