A Passion for High Performance

CCO Profile: Aimee Christian, Ph. D., Jazz Pharmaceuticals

This is the latest in a series of posts featuring CCO stories, examining their priorities and challenges and sharing their experiences.

Success in our profession requires the mental agility to see patterns and connections that are invisible to others. Like Apple’s famous tagline, the best of us are those who “think different.” 

It isn’t unusual to encounter communicators who naturally excel at this nimble thinking. But, to be a successful organizational leader, one must be able to see the hidden opportunity and move the organization to seize it. Aimee Christian is the personification of this combination, and her career journey is a big reason why. 

Going into college, Aimee wanted to be a medical doctor. After being denied admission to med school, she spent a year doing medical technology work in a hospital and was accepted into a Ph.D. program to research the metabolism of cholesterol as it related to atherosclerosis. Though she earned her doctorate, the experience convinced her she didn’t want a career in a lab.

“I had a really strong ability to translate scientific concepts into language that non-scientific people could understand and would find interesting,” she told me. “That was my first sign that communications might be the path for me.”

She also quickly realized that the interpersonal, creative side of her mind would not be fulfilled through solitary laboratory research and strict clinical trial protocols. 

The following years were spent in scientific operations, medical affairs and communications roles from California to Basel to Boston. Her first enterprise leadership role in communications was at the LA-based comprehensive cancer center, City of Hope, followed by the Global Head, Communications role of Sanofi's $12 billion specialty care division. 

Throughout her journey, she’s been an empathetic leader who prioritizes her team’s growth and development. That disposition, her unique scientific background and her blend of left- and right-brain thinking made her an ideal fit when she was named Global Head, Corporate Communications and Engagement at Jazz Pharmaceuticals two years ago. Jazz is a global biopharma company focusing on oncology and neuroscience, “dedicated to bringing life-changing medicines to people with limited or no options.” 

Like many these days, she walked into a function that was stretched. The team of smart, committed communications professionals was trying to be everything to everyone and needed to know their value.

“As most communications teams, we were accountable for communicating the Awareness Days that are important to our employees and the patients we serve,” she told me as an example. “The trouble was that there ended up being 41 different awareness days every year and we communicated on all of them. We were spread too thin and weren’t breaking through.”

Aimee worked with the team to develop a strategy that clearly articulated where they wanted to Lead, where they needed to Contribute and where it was important to Honor. Today, they have whittled their list to seven Leading Awareness Days for which campaigns are created to demonstrate leadership in a particular therapeutic area, such as International Epilepsy Day. Other days have been designated as Contributing days to be a part of the conversation and show support for key audiences, like International Women’s Day, and still other days are allocated as Honoring Days to showcase corporate values or be an ally, like National Cancer Survivor Day. 

In all cases, the team worked to find the ‘story behind the support.’ It wasn’t enough to simply declare advocacy. They now tirelessly work to find the human storytelling elements that demonstrate why they are a leader, advocate or ally. The exercise helped the team to demonstrate their value in driving impactful communications instead of just being busy creating communications that only contribute to noise. Their effort resulted in a 35% increase in followership on social channels in a single year and an early win in her campaign to ground her function in strategic thinking. 

As an example, Jazz changed the way they contribute to the conversation around International Women’s Day. The new strategy indicated that sharing stories would resonate more than simply declaring support. In 2023, Aimee encouraged the team to reach into the organization and align with the IWD theme, “Embrace Equity.” In 2024, they continued the strategy with a message from the new President and COO, an accomplished and inspirational woman herself, to share her message on how she inspires inclusion. The storytelling technique has greatly increased engagement with the channel and has exemplified Jazz Values.

There are other examples of her foundational work to drive progress upward to leadership and downward into her team, such as building a Corporate Communications Playbook and a Social Media Playbook complete with channel and audience analyses and personas. For her team, she’s prioritized their ability to be essential strategic advisors to the business. Her function was, as many are, accustomed to hearing about decisions after they were made and asked to deliver the news. Aimee has worked to ensure her team is embedded in those leadership discussions, learning more about the business and proving their unique ability to see connections and provide counsel that nobody else can.  

However, there’s still work to be done. Like other Biopharmaceutical companies, Jazz operates in a highly regulated space, and risk mitigation is often the needed mindset. She reports to the Chief Legal Officer, so much of what her function does is understandably filtered through that legal risk filter. Therefore, additional discussion is often required to achieve the appropriate comfort level for some communications deliverables. This can be beneficial when managing crises and issues but can be arduous when trying to “think outside the box” with more creative ideas. 

Of course, Aimee understands these risks and the appropriate care that should be taken to maintain compliance, but she’s undeterred from pushing the organization to do new things. An exciting and creative pursuit has been her ongoing partnership with BBC, an organization dedicated to impactful storytelling but an unlikely partner for biopharma. Aimee has done several films with them throughout her career and has brought this partnership to Jazz. She is looking forward to the launch of the latest project, an inspirational story of a patient who lives with a rare sleep disorder and has had an arduous diagnostic journey. Here is one of her favorite films, which showcases the women breaking barriers in hemophilia research and treatment.

As a trained scientist, Aimee is really comfortable with having an experimental mindset, and this helps the team to think creatively and pivot as the environment or circumstances change. Lately, she’s been doing lots of experimenting in AI while she takes an MIT course on the topic and has been challenging her team to include ideas for its use in their 2025 plans. Aimee herself has been using Perplexity as a brainstorming tool in combination with an internal AI that is walled off to protect company information. 

Every day for Aimee is a chance to help her organization appreciate the unique value of her function and for her team to become stronger at providing it. And while she’s been making inroads at elevating her function, she’s still balancing her inner planner with a desire to stay nimble.

“I’m really excited about our journey,” she concluded. “I’m more focused on that than the destination because we want to have the flexibility to follow the path where it leads.”

When Aimee isn’t translating medical jargon into English or relishing spreadsheets more than the average communications professional, she loves to travel and experience new foods and cultures. She’s also an avid home cook and would like to one day host supper clubs, combining her love of food and people. She lives in coastal Maine and her home ‘team’ consists of her husband and two kids, who she has been mentoring to help see their unique value - a son who will graduate in 2025 with a degree in fashion journalism from the University of Arts, London, UK and a daughter who just finished her first year at the US Naval Academy and will be studying weapons, robotics and control engineering.

Aimee and her husband Paul smile with their children, Seth and Fiona		Aimee's daughter Fiona just finished her first year at the U.S. Naval Academy