Lois Larsen

Lois Larsen is the former Statistical Head of General Medicine and Infectious Diseases at AbbVie. As part of this role, she was in charge of more than 50 studies for more than 30 compounds with a staff of around 20 employees. She also established a Statistical Leadership Development curriculum, which provides training in emotional intelligence and executive presence to statisticians, and organized many key statistical processes.

After graduating with a PhD in Statistics from the University of Northern Colorado, Lois Larsen started working at TAP Pharmaceuticals in Chicagoland, which was a joint venture between Takeda and Abbott, and she subsequently moved to Abbott and then AbbVie working on hundreds of trials and dozens of compounds. She started out in women’s health, working on drugs for endometriosis and fibroids.  She also worked on hepatitis C treatments, getting both first-generation and next-generation combinations of Direct Acting Antivirals approved globally for curing hepatitis C in 8 to 24 weeks. As her role expanded to include directing the statistical side of the development of many infectious disease treatments at AbbVie, she also worked on ABBV-4083 for onchocerca volvulus with DNDi, which inspired her to join DNDi’s Scientific Advisory Committee.