Amanda Lopez
Vice President, Talent Management Ardelyx
Amanda Lopez is a strategic Talent Executive with 15+ years of strategic HR leadership experience from companies like Entrada, CRISPR Therapeutics, Intarcia, Immunogen, and Biogen—where she helped prepare for five product launches in five years and has hired over 1,000 people throughout her career. As a Talent Management leader, she designs and delivers integrated talent strategies that enhance the employee experience—strengthening recruitment, developing leaders, driving performance, and expanding learning and career opportunities for an organization’s greatest asset: its people. Before moving in-house, Amanda served as a Principal in Executive Search at J. Robert Scott, and started her career as a management consultant at IBM and The Corporate Executive Board (now part of Gartner).
Seminars
- How can a fast growing life sciences organization move beyond a basic “goals–mid year–end year” performance cycle and embed a culture of continuous, constructive dialogue?
- Explore how the organization is redesigning performance management by introducing quarterly check-ins, soft-skills mindset training, and experiential “aha moment” coaching interventions, supported by external coaches and a plan to train HR as internal coaching partners
- Learn how reframing “feedback” as “coaching” is helping managers build the muscle for productive conversations across G&A, Technical Operations, Quality, Manufacturing, and Clinical, laying the foundation for stronger alignment, higher trust, and measurable improvements in employee development and performance progression
This interactive Q&A explores the intersection of coaching-led performance culture and AI-enabled development, two approaches that between them represent the most significant shift in how organizations are managing talent growth right now.
Participants will examine how these models work alongside each other, where they create tension, and what it takes to build a development culture that is genuinely coaching-first and AI-ready at the same time.
- How do you embed a coaching mindset in managers who were promoted for technical expertise, not people skills?
- What does an AI-enabled development ecosystem look like in a mid-sized biotech without enterprise-scale resources?
- How do you ensure AI-powered skills intelligence translates into different development decisions, not just better data?
- Where does the coaching-first approach and the AI-enabled approach most naturally reinforce each other, and where do they create friction?
