Joan Schmidt

Ms. Schmidt brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in compliance, intellectual property, litigation, governance, and people management within the biopharmaceutical industry. Most recently, she served as the Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at Arena Pharmaceuticals where, as a member of the executive team, she developed and implemented company strategy, and scaled and strengthened the legal, compliance, and intellectual property functions prior to the company’s acquisition by Pfizer in March 2022 for approximately $6.7 billion.

Prior to Arena, Ms. Schmidt served as General Counsel at DBV Technologies and as U.S. General Counsel and Head of Human Resources at Biotronik. Earlier, Ms. Schmidt had positions of increasing responsibility at Novo Nordisk, both in the U.S. and Europe, most recently as Corporate Vice President responsible for global transactions, litigation, and trademarks.

Ms. Schmidt earned her J.D. from Elizabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University and obtained a B.A. from the University of Connecticut.