What Makes a Great Compliance Leader?

Laura Hamm, Director, Corporate Compliance, Aimmune Therapeutics, USA

Great leaders exercise emotional intelligence, and they are very adept at understanding their strengths and weaknesses as well as those around them and can assess a situation pretty accurately and in a timely fashion. In other words, they are intuitive. And though they listen to the advice given by others, they make their own decisions and do not hesitate to stand for what is right.

Laura Hamm is the Compliance Director at Aimmune Therapeutics. Before joining Aimmune, Laura was the Compliance Officer of medical device manufacturer Stryker’s Neurovascular division, a nearly $1B business, and Stryker’s only global division. At Stryker, Laura oversaw all elements of Neurovascular’s compliance program. As a global Compliance Officer, Laura has witnessed the evolution of international regulations, and recognizes the importance of cross-border collaboration to meet global business goals. Laura is passionate about integrating compliance into business DNA, and empowering business partners to achieve objectives with high integrity. Prior to industry, Laura was an educator in the California public school system, focusing on literacy in low-income communities.

Aimmune was created in response to a united call to action from the leading minds and key stakeholders in food allergy who met at an advocacy-sponsored research retreat in 2011 to reach consensus on the direction of food allergy treatment research. Among the outcomes of the retreat, the group concluded that a standard oral immunotherapy (OIT) approach needed to be established, and associated products needed to be developed. When no pharmaceutical company showed interest in developing an OIT treatment, the food allergy community formed Aimmune. Today, Aimmune is working to fulfill the 2011 shared vision of developing a peanut allergy treatment and making it available to allergists for patients worldwide.