People of Amgen: Meet Ponda Motsepe-Ditshego
People of Amgen: Meet Ponda Motsepe-Ditshego
From a young medical student in South Africa to heading up the Amgen South Africa R&D team to the Executive Medical Director of Amgen Canada, PondaMotsepe-Ditshego's career has recently taken her to Thousand Oaks, California, where she is now the Global Executive Medical Director & Platform lead for Amgen’s Bone and Nephrology therapeutic areas. After initially being drawn to the pharmaceutical industry as a way to give back to the heath care environment, Ponda also devotes much of her personal and professional time to giving back to the community.
One of the areas Ponda devotes much of her time to is encouraging girls to explore a career in STEM. From Amgen Canada’s partnership with Let’s Talk Science to the Start to Finish program, watch this video to learn more about Ponda and the ways that Amgen encourages young women in STEM. Ponda also has a strong passion to lead and contribute to Amgen’s DI&B strategic objectives and in her role as the Amgen Black Employees Network’s (ABEN) Global Vice Chair.
My career path started as a young medical student in South Africa. I've always known when I was growing up that I wanted to be a doctor, but I think it was heightened by the fact that I lost my father very early and unexpectedly, and it being a medical condition that actually made us lose him, from heart disease.
I then went on to do my internship and really whilst I was, you know, being a community service physician working in casualty, one of my colleagues told me about the industry. At that time, I was really at a point where I wanted to find a different way to impact patients' life in sciences. I find that being able to work for a pharmaceutical or biotech company like Amgen for example, where you're at the forefront of cutting-edge science, you have access to scientists that are coming up with innovative pathways for curing really serious unmet illness.
For me, that's been really, really impactful. I think that is, it's a different way of giving back to the healthcare environment. In my personal time, I like to dedicate time to being involved in engagements with women where I can be a mentor. We know that there's a problem often with children, especially young girls, dropping out of math or out of science, not showing an interest often for multiple reasons.
Amgen is involved both locally and globally in different charitable organizations that really support either the youth or females to encourage them to look at STEM. The first organization that we support is called Let's Talk Science.
This is a Canadian organization and the aim there is to encourage the youth from as young as three years right up to grade 12 to find science interesting and fun. We also have, from the Amgen Foundation perspective, been involved in the Amgen Biotech Experience and here we are looking at encouraging teachers or helping teachers to create the biotech experience within the classrooms.
And again, I think we have up to 9,000 students maybe yearly that sign up for this. Something that I'm also very passionate about on a personal note is an organization called Start2Finish, that really looks at children who are underprivileged, often impoverished and using reading and exercising to help them realize that they can do and be anything that they want.
A lot of that is focused on STEM. I think the future for Amgen is very bright. I think we have a wonderful pipeline of both oncology and non-oncology molecules that are promising to really change, dramatically change the lives of patients who have serious illnesses or unmet clinical needs. This is really in line with our mission, which is to serve patients.