AZBio Board of Directors
Renée Galá
EVP, Chief Financial Officer
Renée Galá is a strategic executive, advisor and board member with a passion for life sciences. Her 25 years of professional experience spans finance, strategy, corporate/business development and leadership development, primarily within the healthcare industry. She has a proven ability to drive results within large and small companies by building and developing high-performance teams, aligning and driving corporate strategy, solving complex problems, empowering leaders and establishing transparent partnerships with investors and other stakeholders. Renée’s multi-disciplinary experience in private and public life sciences companies enables her to advise and partner with executive teams and boards to construct and execute financial and operational strategies in support of global business objectives.
Renée serves on the board of directors and chairs the audit committee of Gossamer Bio (Nasdaq: GOSS), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company. Previously, she served on the boards of directors and audit committees of Gyroscope Therapeutics, a privately held gene therapy company acquired by Novartis, and Corcept Therapeutics (Nasdaq: CORT), a commercial stage biopharmaceutical company.
Since 2020, Renée has served as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Jazz Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: JAZZ), a global, fully integrated biopharmaceutical company with over $3 billion in annual revenues. At Jazz, she oversees the corporate strategy, finance, corporate development, investor relations and transformation functions. In this role, she oversaw the $7.2 billion acquisition of GW Pharmaceuticals, more than $6 billion in financings, the strategic repositioning of the company and the conception and launch of “Vision 2025” (a longer-term strategic framework for Jazz, announced externally in early 2022).
Previously, Renée served as the CFO of GRAIL, a privately held AI-focused healthcare and technology company acquired by Illumina. At GRAIL, Renée advanced the company’s financing strategy, expanded investor and analyst outreach and progressed the finance organization towards public company readiness. Prior to joining GRAIL, Renée was the CFO of Theravance Biopharma (TBPH), a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company, where she executed numerous financings, helped drive corporate strategy, oversaw multiple business development collaborations, established the company’s operations in Ireland, mentored and developed leaders and co-founded and co-led the company’s gender diversity programming. Renée spent over 12 years in roles of increasing responsibility within the Theravance companies and led the company’s spin-off transaction that resulted in the separation of the company’s biopharma business (TBPH) from the royalty business (INVA, formerly THRX). Prior to Theravance, Renée spent five years at Eli Lilly and Company in positions within global treasury, pharmaceutical sales and corporate strategy/business development, and she spent another seven years in the energy industry focused on corporate finance, project finance and mergers and acquisitions.
Over the course of her career, Renée has executed over $10 billion in financing transactions, overseen or led multiple transformative corporate development transactions and contributed to numerous drug development programs that ultimately became approved medicines.
Renée earned a BS in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
She resides in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband, Juan Galá, and their four children.