Get to know our new leader’s perspective on the most significant challenges facing Life Science manufacturing and how her patient-centric focus drives clarity.
Welcome to Cognite, Monitha! Tell us a bit about yourself…
Hello! It’s really great to be here! I’ve recently joined Cognite as the VP and Industry Principal of our emerging Life Sciences Center of Excellence (CoE). I’m based out of Switzerland and bring over 15 years of Pharma/Life science working with global players like Roche ,Merck etc. Having lived at the intersection of digital transformation and biomanufacturing, quality, regulation, and supply chain across my career. I’ve seen first-hand how technology has evolved in this industry and how important it is for better patient care and outcomes.
What motivates you about the Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical space?
For me, it’s all about the patient at the end of the value chain. Healthcare is a deeply personal, often challenging experience that can be hard enough. Patients deserve reliable access to therapeutics and world-class treatment at fair costs and they are ultimately the reason I show up. Improving manufacturing processes, accelerating time to market, and making supply chains even more resilient ensures that the patients can focus more on what matters. I want to be a driving force to make today’s technology work even harder for the patient and their families.
What do you believe are the most challenging aspects facing life sciences today?
Pharma manufacturing and supply chain are still held back by fragmented data, manual decision-making, and processes that can't scale fast enough. Siloed, uncontextualized data across manufacturing sites, Lab information systems, and quality systems make it nearly impossible to compare performance across plants or get a real-time picture of what's happening on the shop floor. Every delay in a plant startup, every unplanned deviation, every inefficient batch cycle has a downstream cost and that cost is ultimately borne by patients.
Great points...Why is solving for these intelligence gaps so important?
From the manufacturer’s perspective, there is a big opportunity to reduce scrap rates, downtime, and yield losses that directly erode the margins on blockbuster drug programs. Additionally, complex tech transfers, delayed plant startups, and process scale-ups can further add costs and time.
But it’s more than a P&L problem. Any supply disruptions, quality deviations, or manufacturing inefficiencies can translate directly into drug shortages and delayed access - when this happens, patients pay the price.
What made you decide to join Cognite? And what is your charter?
I joined Cognite because it is the first platform I have seen that addresses the root cause, not with more tools, but with the operational intelligence layer that makes the industry's existing investments finally deliver. There are already a handful of customers who have been able to make significant changes to their processes as a result of the technology, and I can clearly see how other manufacturers can take advantage.
At Cognite, my goal is to build and maintain the Pharma Centre of Excellence - collecting, governing, and driving how we leverage the collective experience at Cognite and our Pharma/Life science/Med tech customers to bring compelling solutions to market that improve the entire value chain.
How do you believe Cognite’s technology will help change the narrative?
I believe Cognite's industrial AI and data solutions can fundamentally debottleneck pharma manufacturing, quality and supply chain, accelerating operational efficiency, enabling faster tech transfers, and compressing the time it takes to get life-saving therapies to patients.
Leading digital transformation at the intersection of manufacturing, quality, and regulatory has always meant asking: how do we make complexity manageable at scale? Cognite gives us a real answer: contextualized data, AI-enabled outcomes, and the ability to scale across sites and processes without starting from scratch every time.
What else do our readers need to know?
I’m serious about helping customers move from pilots to enterprise-wide AI-enabled Life science technical operations. If that's the journey you're on, let's co-build what the industry needs next. If you're working through these challenges, I'd love to connect.