Irina Ramos PhD AstraZeneca

Irina Ramos is a director of downstream continuous manufacturing, in the Bioprocess Engineering and Technology group at AstraZeneca in Gaithersburg, MD, USA. She has been a key driver of the technology development and implementation strategy for continuous biomanufacturing. Her team works to increase fundamental understanding of the various downstream unit operations of drug substance manufacturing. They manage the design, testing and qualification of process equipment and automation on the systems to integrate them. Irina holds a BS/MS in Chemical Engineering from University of Porto (Portugal) and a PhD in Chemical & Biochemical Engineering from University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). For the past 14 years, Irina’s work in the pharmaceutical industry has spanned from early to late-stage process development and validation, process scalability, CMC and technology transfer to both clinical and commercial manufacturing. With that experience, Irina lead process transfer efforts of the AZ COVID-19 vaccine. She has been involved with NIIMBL Process Intensification program by leading the Control Strategy workstream since 2020. Irina has been teaching a graduate level classes on Biotechnology Master program since 2015. She is passionate about mentorship and developing resources to improve the communication of science.