In this month’s installment of Meet The Squad, we would liked to introduce you to Greg Christianson. Greg has been an integral part of the team for the past 7 years. Continue reading to learn more about Greg and an unforgettable trip that most people wouldn’t even try.
Hi, I’m Greg Christianson – a lucky husband married almost 25 years and the father of three. I love adventure, creating new things, and passionate irreverent people. I also happen to be a principal with Nuvera Life Science Consulting having joined the team a little over seven years ago. Before my time here, I had the opportunity to work with several large pharmaceutical companies such as J&J, Novartis, and GSK over the previous 20+ years.
What led to this career? During my time prior to Nuvera, I had the opportunity to work across a ton of different areas including licensing & acquisitions, insights, sales, payer access, commercial operations, etc. Coming back to the patient services world was a key driver for me joining Nuvera, having developed a passion for the space when building out the early patient services organization at Novartis. Nuvera provided me a chance to get much closer to directly impacting patients. In addition, Nuvera has provided the opportunity to have a significant impact on how a company operates. Over time, I’ve had the chance to guide the development of our culture, values & competencies, hiring practices, strategic planning process
What behavior or personality trait do you most attribute your success to, and why? As always, a blessing and a curse – for those that know me, I tend to be a bit of a focused driver… this (some would say intensity) has allowed me to accomplish a lot of things, but I can’t tell you how many times I received development feedback over my career around flexibility lol. I think another trait I have that has helped me succeed is creativity – from tinkering with existing processes to make them better, to different ideas that break the mold, creativity has allowed me to bring some pretty cool things to life that continue to be used years after creation. Always makes me happy to see that.
What’s a trip that changed you, and why? I’ve been mountaineering with a set of buddies since college almost every year and have had the chance to do some awesome trips. A couple of years ago we climbed Denali in Alaska unguided – 22 days on the side of the mountain, carrying and pulling crazy weight, freezing bitter cold, building our own camps, storms, crevasses… just brutal. We had several seriously stressful extended moments on that trip – and we made it. The mental focus to just make it through each moment and not worry about anything outside of it was transformative. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done by a long shot, but knowing I had what it took makes me feel pretty good!
If you could choose a superpower, what would it be? Not really a super power, but I’d love to live for as long as I wanted (maybe with the ability to hibernate for 100 years at a time) – I’m so interested to see what the future holds from a technology perspective, whether we make it to the stars, meet ET, etc.
What’s one hobby you’d love to get into? I’m dying to get into woodworking – When I was younger my dad had a great workshop where we were able to build all sorts of stuff… someday soon I’m looking forward to having the space to set up my own workshop and actually be able to have everything out and organized without getting disrupted by little gremlins who use tools and don’t put them back.
