Ji Zhang was Senior Vice President, Global Head of R&D Operations (now retired).

As head of R&D Operations, his teams
• Integrate interdisciplinary scientific and clinical operations across the scientific platforms, to provide expertise and high caliber support to R&D projects, delivering new medicines with high quality, reduced cycle time, and well controlled cost.
• Have overall responsibility for infrastructure and capital investments.
• Provide operational strategic input to overall R&D strategy; ensure alignment between strategy and operations, implement and execute effectively, focus on efficient operations and productivity improvements.
• Ensure seamless transition of projects from Research to early Development, helping the teams to reduce cycle time and increase research productivity by applying translational approaches, leading to a sustainable and enriched R&D development pipeline.
• Develop efficient and industrializable CMC processes; deliver clinical trials materials, and seamless and effective transfer to IA.
• Deliver relevant high quality submission dossiers including preclinical, clinical pharmacology, CMC dossiers, clinical study reports and integrated summaries of safety and efficacy, leading to successful submissions and approvals of new medicines.
• Recruit, develop and retain high caliber talent and expertise; strengthen, develop and deploy innovative technologies to ensure we have the right expertise and capabilities to enable our project development.

He joined Sanofi in 2003 as Vice President, Head of Biostatistics and Programming. Prior to joining Sanofi, he worked at Merck Research Laboratories. Ji has published extensively in clinical development research areas. Ji holds a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics, probability and statistics from Peking University, China. He earned a Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University.