Lynne Faust
Lynne FaustMy Dallas Story
How a Global Pharmaceutical Role and Equestrian led one Executive to DFW
There are a lot of reasons people move to Dallas-Fort Worth. For Lynne Faust, geography was key.
“You know, you truly can get anywhere you need to be nonstop, and I have a global role, so I need to be everywhere.”
Faust works for WuXi STA, a subsidiary of WuXi AppTec a premier Contract Research, Development and Manufacturing Organization (CRDMO) that serves clients across the life science industry. She’s an organic chemist by training and worked in research labs for the first 8 years of her career, in Albany, New York. She moved down to DFW about seven years ago, taking on increasing responsibility for the North American business development team at WuXi STA, and now manages 12 direct reports.
These companies typically have moved through the phases of clinical trials owning the intellectual property to their drug, but don’t necessarily have all their own infrastructure to support the full product life cycle. As a contract research and development manufacturer (CRDMO), WuXi STA can step in and speed up the process to commercialization.
Faust’s team also supports clients who aren’t as far along. For example, they may have discovered a novel compound, but have very little lab space to produce enough drug for the investigational new drug (IND) process.
These are companies that could be located anywhere in the U.S. – places such as Boston, Philadelphia, and San Diego. But work isn’t the only reason she’s in the air almost every week — Faust also rides horses competitively.
“The last six weeks I was in and out of DFW airport probably every Monday, coming back on a Thursday.”
She started riding hunter-jumpers as a child and started the intercollegiate equestrian team at the University of Albany while in graduate school. Now she’s a member of the National Reined Cow Horse Association, Stock Horse of Texas and the Ranch Horse Association of America, which held its heritage days in May, in Abilene. There, her love for equestrian sports and her career converged as her horse trailer occasionally becomes her home office.
At home in Weatherford, she feels like she has the best of both worlds.
“Almost all the national competitions start from here — Fort Worth and the Will Rogers Memorial Center is pretty much the hub for everything that we do. Some shows are up in Oklahoma, once a year we go to Las Vegas, and then we also go to Scottsdale. And on the work side of things, until COVID, I was going to Shanghai four or five times a year amongst other international and domestic travel.”
Increasingly, she sees people getting priced out of bigger cities that have a reputation for fostering life sciences. Many are ditching the coasts for North Texas, looking for a better quality of life, and bringing valuable skills and knowledge with them.
And though not everyone is going to be at DFW International as frequently as Faust, that influx of experience keeps the ecosystem growing.