Dr. Frank L. Douglas

Pharmaceutical executive and research director Dr. Frank L. Douglas was born on April 30, 1943 in Georgetown, Guyana to Stella Douglas. A Fulbright scholar, he moved to the United States in 1963 and received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1966. He went on to earn his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry in 1972 and his M.D. degree in 1977 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Douglas began his residency at the Osler Medical Service at the John Hopkins Medical Institute in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977, and he also worked as a clinical associate at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Douglas was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service from 1979 to 1982. He went on to become the director of the Hypertension Clinic, assistant professor in the department of medicine, and member of the committee on clinical pharmacology at the University of Chicago from 1982 to 1984. He was then hired as the executive director of clinical biology at Ciba-Geigy Pharmaceutical Corporation in Summit, New Jersey. He also worked as a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1988, he became senior vice president, director of research, and a member of the pharmaceutical division management committee at Ciba-Geigy. Douglas then moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked as the executive vice president of Marion Merrell Dow, Inc. in 1992. Three years later, after a merger of Marion Merrel Dow and Hoechst, a German pharmaceutical company, Douglas became the executive vice president of Hoechst Marion Roussel. From 1999 to 2004, Douglas served as the executive vice president and chief scientific officer of Aventis Pharma AG and Aventis SA. Then, he became a professor of practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, two science departments, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Sciences and Technology until 2007. In 2009, Douglas served as the president and CEO of the Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron, Ohio. He worked at the institute until 2015 when he was hired as the CEO of The Vax Genetics Vaccine Company. He founded Safe Haven Dialogues LLC in 2020.

Douglas served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Battelle Memorial Institute from 2012 to 2018. He also served on the Board of Trustees of BioOhio, the Ohio Medical Corridor Committee between 2011 and 2014, the board of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Throughout his career, Douglas received numerous awards and honors including a Rock Star of Science Award from the Geoffrey Beene Foundation and GQ Magazine in 2010, an Alumni Special Achievement Award from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2016, and the Dr. Costel Denson '56 Distinguished Alumni Award from Lehigh University in 2019.

Douglas and his wife, Lynnet, have three children: Katrina, Nataki, and Diah Douglas. Douglas resides in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Dr. Frank L. Douglas was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on January 29, 2025 and February 13, 2025.