“I encourage women to raise their hand, be ready to tell their story, and ask for what they want.”

Anabella Villalobos was born in Panama City in the early 1960s. She discovered her passion of chemistry in high school and obtained her B.S. in chemistry at the University of Panama. In 1981, Villalobos earned a Fulbright-Hays fellowship and traveled to the U.S. to obtain an M.S. and Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry at the University of Kansas. She then worked as NIH postdoc at Yale. Although language barriers were a struggle throughout her graduate studies. Villalobos stayed in the U.S. and started her professional career at Pfizer in 1989 developing treatments for Alzheimer’s. She eventually rose to be the head of Pfizer’s medicinal synthesis technologies in 2001. Her work developed a multiparameter optimization tool which evaluated small molecules as drug candidates. In 2016, Villalobos was recruited by Biogen to work as vice president of Neuroscience and Pain Medicinal Chemistry at the company. Since joining, Biogen has released the 1^st FDA approved Alzheimer’s treatment.