Contact Information

tel: (610) 758-6831
fax: (610) 758-5057
e-mail: loh208@lehigh.edu

Background

Industrial experience

Professor Herz has over eight years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She joined Bristol-Myers Squibb Company in 2000 as a Technical Investigator supporting the manufacture of sterile liquid and lyophilized (freeze-dried) drug products. Her responsibilities included the technology transfer of products from R&D to the manufacturing sites, as well as providing technical support for the production of commercialized pharmaceuticals. Professor Herz later managed early-phase clinical operations and process scale-up of protein therapeutics. Her areas of expertise include sterile drug product manufacture, technology transfer, and regulatory compliance, as well as the development of cell culture, tangential flow filtration, and lyophilization processes.

Professor Herz was also employed at International Specialty Products from 1993 to 1995, where she developed and scaled-up processes for synthetic polymers.

Prior research

The primary objective of Professor Herz’s thesis research was to study control of metabolic flux in plant biochemical pathways. Vanilla planifolia embryo cultures were used as a model system, since they produce readily detectable secondary metabolites, including vanillin, the main component of vanilla flavor. The results of experimental studies were used to perform metabolic control analysis (MCA), a method used to determine the extent to which each enzyme in a biochemical pathway controls flux through the pathway.