Jaap Venema

Jaap Venema, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Science Officer (CSO) for USP, leads the organization’s scientific strategy and development of quality standards for medicines, dietary supplements, food ingredients and healthcare practice. Dr. Venema oversees implementation of the USP Science Quality Framework, which grounds quality standards development in pharmaceutical science to increase public trust in medicines. He guides exploration of emerging technologies that may inform future quality standards; oversees collaborations with other pharmacopeial and scientific groups; and serves as Chair of USP’s Council of Experts, the group that spearheads the development of science-based public quality standards. Dr. Venema guides development of draft standards by USP’s numerous Expert Committees, which are comprised of nearly a thousand scientific experts from academia, industry, healthcare, as well as government agencies.

Dr. Venema’s more than 25 years’ experience in global research and development, as well as academic research, informs his scientific leadership at USP and has been critical to USP’s response to the current COVID-19 health crisis. Dr. Venema previously served in a variety of scientific leadership positions at Solvay and AbbVie (formerly Abbott Laboratories), where he held various roles in drug discovery and development in vaccines, pain care and immunology, and developed and implemented a global scientific and medical strategy for biotherapeutics. Before his transition to industry, Dr. Venema was a post-doctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Sciences at the Free University of Amsterdam.

A native of the Netherlands, Dr. Venema earned his master’s degree in Chemistry from the Free University of Amsterdam, and his doctoral degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Leiden University in the Netherlands.