Shirley Smith has been named director of Quality and Yuan Chen has een named Senior Pharmaceutical Scientist at Velesco Pharmaceutical Serivces. Ms. Smith and Ms. Chen recently joined the company.

Prior to joining Velesco, Ms. Smith was the Quality Assurance Manager for Richard-Allan Scientific (a unit of Thermo Fisher Scientific) and the Senior Quality Assurance Manager for Pfizer’s Drug Product and Device Research Group in Kalamazoo, MI. In conjunction with her role at Velesco, she will continue her leadership role of PharmaMed Resources, a quality assurance and regulatory affairs consulting business that services the medical device and pharmaceutical Industries. She has more than 25 years of experience in the field, and has performed as a lead GMP auditor of contract vendors in manufacturing, packaging, laboratories, devices, suppliers, and more.

Ms. Chen has extensive experience in analytical methods development and validation, cleaning verification and validation, and drug release testing.

Before joining Velesco, she served in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Division of Pfizer Global R&D as a Senior Associate Scientist for eight years and the Analytical Development Department of Caraco Pharmaceutical Laboratories for two years. Her responsibilities and projects spanned the drug development spectrum from early stage development and validation of stability-indicating methods for the release of drug substance and drug product, to later stage projects focused on the detection of residual drugs on manufacturing equipment.