Vikram Karnani

My path to leading Collegium Pharmaceutical as President and CEO wasn't a straight line. I grew up in India watching two very different kinds of leadership. My father was a general manager, then a CEO. He was a soft-spoken man who commanded respect not through volume, but through the quality of his judgment. My mother was an anesthesiologist who would go on call for 36 to 48 hours straight. As a kid, I'd sometimes go with her to the hospital in the middle of the night, sitting quietly with my books while she worked. The impact she had on patients and their families was as profound as anything I've ever seen in a boardroom. I spent my career trying to find a way to bring both of those models together. I started as an electrical engineer, moved into management consulting, and eventually made my way into healthcare, first in medical devices, then pharma. Over the next decade at Horizon Therapeutics, I helped build something extraordinary. Scaling a rare disease business from a standing start into a global commercial operation spanning 13 countries. I was part of the team that saw it through to a $28B acquisition by Amgen, where I led global commercial strategy and medical affairs for the rare disease portfolio through the integration. What drew me to Collegium was the company's strong foundation working in areas where patient need is real and the accountability standard is high, and the people who showed up because they genuinely believed in the mission.Now we're building the next chapter and working to make Collegium a name people recognize for building stronger communities. The conditions we focus on don't follow a schedule, and the people we serve deserve companies built around that reality.