My Story
Most people know me from one chapter. The corporate exec who made VP by 40 and led 2,500 people across 60 countries. Or the woman with a shovel planting trees in Kraków on weekends. Or the bioethicist lecturing at Yale on informed consent. Or the one who walked away from a COO role to become a competitive athlete at 42.
They’re not different people. They’re the same operating system, applied to different problems.
The Common Thread
I spent a long time not being able to explain why I kept doing seemingly unconnected things. Then I realized they weren’t unconnected at all.
Every chapter of my life has been driven by the same three questions:
What can I do? — Agency. Not what am I allowed to do, or what’s expected of me, but what’s actually possible if I decide to act.
How do I sustain it? — Discipline. Showing up consistently, measuring progress, improving systematically. Whether it’s a grassroots urban movement or a Fortune 500 P&L or a shooting range.
Why does it matter? — Impact. Not for the title or the recognition. Because someone else’s life gets better. A city gets a park. A patient understands what they’re consenting to. A junior woman in pharma sees someone who looks like her reach VP. An impossible goal gets executed — and someone watching decides theirs might be possible too.
Agency. Discipline. Impact.
That’s the operating system. It starts with Agency — what’s actually possible if I act. It’s sustained by Discipline — showing up every day regardless. It’s justified by Impact — because it makes someone else’s life better. It hasn’t changed. Only the arena has.
The Chapters
aDaSie — Kraków, 2013 I founded a grassroots movement in Kraków with no budget, no structure, and no authority. Just residents who believed they could improve their city if someone organized them. Ten years later: six public parks, solar panels on schools, graffiti removed, murals created, a model that reshaped how the city collaborates with its citizens. Agency: believing residents could act without permission. Discipline: ten years, zero pay. Impact: a city that looks different.
Bioethics — Yale & the Industry Informed consent in clinical trials sounds like paperwork. It isn’t. It’s the moment a patient is treated as a partner in the decision — not a passive recipient of a protocol, but a person who understands what they’re agreeing to and why it matters. I spent years pushing the industry to design it that way — teaching at Yale, publishing peer-reviewed research, advocating inside organizations that didn’t always want to hear it. Agency: mine in choosing to prioritize this, and the patients’ in finally being given the information to exercise their own. Discipline: doing it alongside a demanding executive career. Impact: better consent processes, better protected people.
The Executive Years — Pfizer, IQVIA, Labcorp, Fortrea For over 20 years I built and scaled organizations in clinical research. VP by 40 — the first non-English-speaking woman to hold that position in my division. COO. Teams of 600 to 2,500 people. 60+ countries. $500M P&L. Post-merger transformations. I achieved every “impossible” goal I set — not by being the most talented person in the room, but by being the most systematic. Agency: believing the door was open even when nobody looked like me. Discipline: twenty years of showing up. Impact: results, and the doors left open for everyone who came after.
The Athletic Pursuit — Now In 2025, at 42, I returned to precision air pistol shooting — a sport I’d tried at 14. Not as a hobby. As a pursuit. I train 5 days a week, 260+ days a year. I work with coaches. I study sport science. I’m in conversation with Olympians, learning what it takes to compete at the highest levels. I’ve completed my first international competitions. Agency: the decision to start. Discipline: showing up every day for a goal that will take years. Impact: in the making.
Why I Share This
I document the journey publicly — on LinkedIn, in media, in keynotes — for three specific audiences.
For FOD leaders (First, Only, Different): if you’re the first woman, the only outsider, the different one in the room — you know the weight of feeling like you can’t leave without letting everyone down. This is proof that you can. That what’s on the other side isn’t smaller. Just different.
For boards and executives: the discipline that built a Fortune 500 career doesn’t disappear when you leave a title. It shows up in how I advise, how I analyze, how I execute against a long timeline. The athletic pursuit isn’t separate from my professional credibility — it’s an extension of it.
For anyone in the middle of an impossible goal: I’m not sharing a success story. I’m documenting a pursuit, in real time, with real gaps between where I am and where I’m going. Because the honest version of “impossible goals are just well-executed plans” includes the part where the plan is still running.
Featured in Forbes Poland. Keynoted UNGA79, UNESCO, TEDx, LSE. Vital Voices Visionary Fellow. Harvard Kennedy School Leadership Fellow. PhD Pharmacology.