She Steers: Tanya Bos, Non-Executive Director, BioSci Toolkit CIC

^{Tanya Bos, Non-Executive Director at BioSci Toolkit CIC, discusses securing her first NED role as part of the She Steers programme}

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.

I've spent around 25 years in global biopharma, working across both large pharma and high-growth biotech, including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Shire and Takeda, AstraZeneca and Novartis/Sandoz. My career is much more of a lattice than anything linear. I've always been drawn to the less predictable opportunities, energised by tackling the unknown, learning something new, and driving impact through curiosity. This has meant a series of deliberate moves across geographies and very different parts of the industry, from generics into innovative medicines, then rare disease, and most recently, first-in-class advanced therapeutics. I love working at the intersection of drug development and commercialisation, laying pathways to bring new medicines to patients and building the organisation and teams to make it happen. Although I currently call the UK home, I remain a Canadian at heart with one foot in Portugal, and a four-legged family who believe they run both households.

2. What drew you to the She Steers NEDs in biotech programme?

Board service was a deliberate decision, and I wanted to prepare for it properly, recognising that board careers take years to build, and I wanted to start laying the groundwork well before that chapter arrives. I had completed Harvard Business School's Preparing to be a Corporate Director programme, which gave me the governance foundations, but She Steers offered something different, a programme built specifically for female executives in biopharma, by people who understand how biotech boards actually work, and most importantly, alongside a genuinely impressive cohort of women from across the life sciences. The gap in board representation across our industry is well documented. What appealed to me about She Steers was that it wasn't just naming the problem, it was curating the networks and building the pipeline to fix it.

3. How have you found the programme so far? What have you gained from it personally, what's been valuable for you and how has it supported you in your career?

The absolute standout has been the network. She Steers surrounded me with a group of exceptionally talented female leaders, speakers and sponsors, and I felt genuinely humbled to be in their mix. There's something powerful about preparing for board service alongside women who bring such depth of experience from across the life sciences, the conversations are candid, the generosity is real, and everyone is both learning and teaching at once. Beyond the sessions themselves, that peer network is what endures, and I suspect it will keep paying forward for all of us for years.

4. You've now secured your first NED role. How did the programme help you get there, and what's next?

To be honest, for me this was less about securing a board seat and more about finding a board where the mission aligns with my values and where I can contribute strategically, and that kind of fit takes time, deliberate relationship building and patience. The programme reinforced exactly that discipline, alongside sharpening how I articulate board value, which is a different skill from articulating executive achievement.

My first appointment is as a Non-Executive Director of BioSci Toolkit, a Community Interest Company opening up bioscience degrees and careers for students from Black, mixed and seldom-heard ethnic communities. Throughout my career I've seen what mentors, sponsors and allies make possible, so a governance role in service of changing the dialogue upstream on representation in the life sciences is a genuine values match. As for what's next, my focus is on doing this role well alongside my executive career.

5. Looking back, what advice would you give to aspiring female NEDs who are earlier in their journey?

Don't set out to secure a board seat, set out to find the right board, one whose mission you'd serve gladly and where your experience genuinely moves the needle. That reframing changes everything about how you approach it. Build your network deliberately and, most critically, early, because the right fit surfaces through relationships, understanding and awareness, and that takes time. Get precise about your board value, which is not the same as your executive CV. And start before you feel fully ready, the readiness comes from the doing, and the women a few steps ahead of you are almost always generous with what they've learned, so ask.

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