ELEVATE: Serendipity, Courage and the Power of "So What": A Conversation with Susan D'Costa

In this episode of Elevate: Women Leading the Way in Pharma Outsourcing, host Marianne Gissane talks to Susan D'Costa, Chief Technical and Commercial Officer at Genezen, about the winding route from a microbiology lab in Mumbai to the C-suite of a gene therapy CDMO, and what it takes to keep choosing courage over comfort along the way.

Susan D'Costa describes her own career as a story of serendipity. She wanted to go to medical school, didn't get the grades in India, and studied microbiology instead, hating nearly every minute of her first few months squinting down a monocular microscope at gram stains. Three decades and two continents later, she's Chief Technical and Commercial Officer at Genezen, a gene and cell therapy CDMO based in Indianapolis. Getting there had less to do with a plan than with what she chose to do each time the ground shifted under her.

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A career built from what she stumbled into

After a non-thesis master's in biochemistry in Mumbai, Susan moved to the US alone to pursue a PhD, landing at Texas Tech University to study insect viruses. It wasn't the subject she'd have picked. She'd never worn lab gloves before and had never used a micropipette, and found the whole field very dry at first. Then she found her way into poxvirus research and, from there, into a fourteen-year stint in Rich Condit's lab at the University of Florida, first as a PhD student, then as a postdoc and research faculty. She credits Condit with shaping how she thinks about science and about work more broadly. When a job posting appeared for a University of Florida centre run by AAV virologist Richard Snyder, the same insect virus expertise she'd once dismissed as niche turned out to be exactly what his gene therapy manufacturing platform needed. That single connection, in September 2013, pulled her into CDMO work for good, through Florida Biologix, Brammer Bio and Thermo Fisher Scientific, into technical sales, then into Alcyone Therapeutics, and eventually to Genezen as Chief Technical and Commercial Officer.

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Courage of conviction in rooms built for someone else

Susan is candid about what changed and what didn't as she moved from academic labs into corporate boardrooms. She rarely felt like an outsider in the lab, surrounded by immigrants and non-immigrants alike who were open and welcoming. Leadership settings were different. Being the only woman in a room full of assertive, confident men took a kind of confidence she says she didn't always have. A colleague, Rachel, once pointed out that two women in a boardroom can shift the whole dynamic of who gets heard, and Susan felt that shift for herself once Rachel joined the executive team at Alcyone. Her own coping strategy, one she learned from Rich Condit, is to summarise a conversation back to the room in her own words. It clarifies her own understanding, and it quietly gives cover to everyone else too nervous to ask the question themselves.

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Learning to fail

The person Susan credits most with pushing her past her own limits is her husband, JD. When she was offered a move into quality control, a discipline she knew nothing about, she went home certain she couldn't do it. JD's response was always the same question: what's the worst that can happen? If she failed, she reasoned, she could go back to academia. So she took the job.

"The perseverance that comes from failing is more important than the thrill you get from succeeding."

That principle, repeated to her often enough that it stuck, is one she now credits with getting her to the C-suite at all.

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Paying it forward

Susan arrived in the US without a support system beyond her PhD and postdoc mentors, none of whom had worked in industry themselves. Once she'd worked out how to open those doors, she made a point of holding them open for others, taking the time to reply to students and postdocs who reach out to her on LinkedIn. She traces some of that instinct to a former boss, Becky, who told her plainly that you don't get ahead by stepping on other women, you bring them with you. Her mother, who passed away last year having raised six children and insisted Susan never give up her career after having kids, is never far from that same thread. Both of Susan's daughters have gone into health related fields of their own.

For anyone building a career across borders, disciplines or seniority levels, Susan's conversation with Marianne offers a grounded look at how far a willingness to fail, and a habit of holding the door open for the next person, can actually take you.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.