# The Big Pharma Habits You Have to Unlearn in a Startup, with Dawn Lundin

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/let-s-talk-quality-6567110/the-big-pharma-habits-you-have-to-unlearn-in-a-startup-with-dawn-lundin
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/let-s-talk-quality-6567110/the-big-pharma-habits-you-have-to-unlearn-in-a-startup-with-dawn-lundin.md
Podcast: [Let's Talk Quality](https://stenobird.com/podcast/let-s-talk-quality-6567110)
Published: 2026-07-14T12:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://rx-group.io/captivate-podcast/the-big-pharma-habits-you-have-to-unlearn-in-a-startup-with-dawn-lundin
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/1de3d468-0018-4070-b76d-405eded74135.mp3
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Duration seconds: 1773

## Resource

Twenty years at Merck, then a leap into academia and psychedelic medicine - here is how Dawn Lundin built a quality career on instinct. Dawn Lundin on the big pharma habits you have to unlearn in a startup. In today's episode I was joined by Dawn Lundin, founder of her own quality consultancy and a fractional Head of Quality across biotech and psychedelic-medicine companies. I really wanted to speak to Dawn because her path is nothing like the typical quality leader's. She didn't stay inside big pharma and climb one ladder. She spent twenty years at Merck, then walked into academia, then into one of the most stigmatised fields in medicine, and she made each move work. Dawn started as a bench chemist and grew through GLP, clinical packaging, GCP auditing and pharmacovigilance, eventually heading up issues management and co-authoring the first quality manual for Merck's research division. Then, on the morning of her twentieth anniversary, she resigned. She moved to the University of Pennsylvania to build fit for purpose quality systems for both sponsor and site research, a system still in use today. From there she stepped into psychedelic medicine for mental health, a move driven as much by personal loss as by professional curiosity. What runs through Dawn's whole story is a refusal to lead by importing an old playbook. In a smaller, faster environment she learned to do quality with far less, to put relationships before procedures, and to build trust before she changed a single thing. Her line for it has stuck with me: she did quality "one cup of coffee at a time." We talk about the following: Why she left twenty years at Merck on the exact morning of her anniversary The big pharma habits leaders have to unlearn in academia and startups How to build a fit for purpose qua…

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