senior research associate

scientist

senior scientist

associate director

research associate

Novavax

1)A typical day at work:
Fielding a voluminous amount of frivolous email that broke into teams chats occurring outside your working hours.  Spending excessive amounts of time booking yourself to avoid every second being captured by some disgruntled employee.  Extinguishing manufactured fires/emergencies and playing politics with ignorant and incapable peers to senior leaders.  Spending early mornings or evening doing "catch up work" as you are not left alone enough to actually complete your own deliverables.  

2)What you believe you learned:
Boundaries with toxic, floundering corporations until you find a better place to work. Understanding the value of your work within the "office hours" and setting expectations on work that devalues yourself (i.e., overtime weekend work, responding to emails on vacation, etc.).
 
3)Management:
Broken, ineffective, dramatic, and purveyors of meaningless tasks. Few hold any actual value and have zero understanding of the functions of those who report to or function around them.  Example: skill examinations that contained an art section (drawing) for QA employees that were used to determine annual salary increases.  Employees must always be on guard or face being swept up in their political games. 

4)Workplace culture:
Broken. If interviewing, ask how effective their 'culture committees' and 'mentorship' programs are. Request details and examples with data how those programs bettered the workforce after at least two published rounds of lay offs. 

5)The hardest part of the job:
Perpetually staying ahead of the politics, wondering if you were or anyone on your team is keeping their job, listening to "re-calibration" chatter from senior leaders to isolate on what really matters. Within the hour getting side phone calls to help their buddies.  Chasing perceptions and opinions to non-problems. 

6)The most enjoyable part of the job:
Getting paid, the holiday break at the end of the year, and finally quitting. 

•	Perform triage and assign priority to incoming SAEs
•	Classify SEAs according to regulatory reporting criteria
•	Evaluate cases for seriousness, relatedness, and expectedness according to the protocol and/or investigator brochure
•	Confirm presence of adequate information needed to perform case evaluation, and review relevant source documents for consistency and verification of adverse event data
•	Initiate follow-up activities to investigative sites as needed, to retrieve missing information, according to SAE reporting requirements, regulatory guidelines, and department SOPs
•	Perform MedDRA coding, as per SOPs and guidelines
•	Perform QC of all cases
•	Mentor new staff to complete their training and preparedness for inclusion in the production safety database
•	Prepare narratives, according to approved template
•	Adhere to required timelines for processing SAE reports
•	Ensure that product specific reports are prepared and submitted in accordance with departmental and company guidelines
•	Maintain a thorough understanding and strict adherence to GCP guidelines and regulatory reporting regulations

Novavax Inc. is one of a few biotech companies taking advantage of  recently FDA approved baculovirus-based biotechnology to make safe and effective vaccines.
They are a fast paced company that has rapidly made vaccines for such pathogens such as influenza, RSV and Ebolavirus.  Their technology involves expressing parts of pathogens in the form of VLPs and nanoparticles.  This is a universal platform technology that can be applied to many pathogens thus giving employees the chance to work on many different projects in the future.
Persons working at Novavax will learn to work in a close nit team environment.  At the same time there is good separation of groups within the organization such as quality control, R&D and production.  There is little redundancy and management has done a good job organizing groups to maximize productivity.  
People are generally happy working at Novavax.  There is plenty of training in areas such as GLP and safety.  The company is a positive place to work and keeps employees informed of milestone accomplishments and future goals of the company.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The people were great overall, but everyone is very dispersed working remotely.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Leadership and lack of transparency. If you were part of the "crew," the favorites, you would likely receive promotions and raises for doing the basics. The company treated the money from the government like it was its own slush fund and spent it wildly, which is why it is where it is now. 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Culture?  Do what I say not what I do... Let's not share information because it make my job stronger when you don't know much about things.  

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Waiting for peple to get on endless conference calls without any proper resolution.

The company will definitely fail due to their bad management. The people, even though, VP level, did not want to take any responsibility and risk, hold one meeting after another, and let others to make the decision. 

Bad working ability, just copy from previous failed study to apply to the ongoing study without thinking if it fits or not. The trail design is very unprofessional, need to fixed again and again. Data collecting rule changed in one day. Analysis group did not know how to handle and dig the data, but just want to pick the good part to please upper management. All different departments are good at one thing, protect themselves and push the responsibilities to others. Nice job! No wonder why they fail!

Potentially good molecules tarnished by mismanagement at the higher levels.  To be fair the company fell on bad luck with their phase 3 trial results, and hard choices needed to be made.  However, they suffered from numerous bouts of growing pains and lack of direction as they moved forward to later stage development.  The breakneck pace, personality clashes, and upper level entrenchment lead to numerous mistakes, and good people leaving big voids.  It's a great place to learn more, and test your metal under pressure, but can also be a source of frustration.  I would compare their culture similar to a CDMO where the pressure is high, but the lack of a product or strong funding leaves a big question mark.

What is the best part of working at the company?
Resignation was the best part.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Lack of acknowledgement and rewards, unappreciative management, lack of growth.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Very segregated. There is essentially 4 companies in one that all operate under different standards. Clinical, IT and HR reward their people and have much more reasonable standards to operate under. The GMP space is impossible. Outrageous standards. Anything done is not enough, no one is promoted and the culture is a very punishing environment to work in.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Upset and disappointment on a continuing basis.

After the COVID crisis, we're hearing about Novavax more (as a knowledge-based company). I expect to face a professional approach to elevate the human resource capabilities - specifically in the recruitment process. What a spoiled expectation! As far as I saw, they prefer to remain traditionality, maintain their conservative culture, and not to bring a new approach to their closed circle of staff. They do not want to hear about their pitfalls (at all!). Hence, they will pay the price in the future when they lose their human capital (unfortunately). There is nobody to rely on for the follow-up of the corrective actions. I have learned there is a much difference between media and reality.

Go with your other options if you'd like to keep your mental health.
You'll face directors who are not knowledgeable enough for their position, are rarely there, and don't want to know their teams. The company's turnover is so high (even before layoffs), and anyone who had a chance used to leave the company. However, they take credit for team accomplishments and get promoted to senior directors.  
You'll experience the toxic environment painfully and learn how an insecure boss can damage your professional growth and motivation. 

I agree with other reviews. The best part was the resignation. 

A typical day at work was very interactive and filled with learning from my standpoint.

I learned lot about the upstream cell culture process and the downstream cell culture process.

Management was helpful.

Coworkers came from different work backgrounds, but we worked together to accomplish our goals.

During that time, the hardest part about my job was the commute and the pay.

The most enjoyable part of my job was learning new processes with my coworkers.

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