Top Roche Executive Departs

Earlier this month, Tiffany Olson , North American head of Swiss biotech giant Roche Diagnostics and president and CEO of Roche Diagnostics Corp. (Indianapolis), announced her resignation from the company, effective immediately. Michael Tillmann, previously head of Roche Diagnostic's Asia-Pacific region, located in Singapore, has stepped into Olson's role.

Olson cited personal reasons for her departure and said that she had been considering taking her career in a different direction for some time. However, she noted that she was determined to leave the company on a high note. She says that one of her goals over the past 12 months was to put her business in the healthiest position possible—a goal that she's proud to say she achieved. “The North American business is performing strongly,” she says. “Currently performance is at double-digit growth over the prior year with strong growth in new products.”

On the personal front, Olson also notes that she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Today, she says she is cancer-free and feels healthy. Her decision to resign was not health related, she says; rather, she realized that the timing was right for her to make a change.

Looking back on her nearly a dozen years with Roche, Olson says several accomplishments stand out in her mind. “Embedding quality in the organization was an important initiative to ensure that the Indianapolis location had a robust and sustainable quality system,” she says. “This was very successful and involved several years' work along with the participation of the entire campus.

“Over the past three years, many new products have gained rapid market acceptance and helped to fuel the growth,” Olson adds.

Despite her departure from Roche, Olson says she expects to remain a contributing member in the healthcare industry. “My entire career has been in healthcare, and it has been extremely rewarding,” she says. “This is where the strength of my contributions can have the biggest effect, and I'm currently looking for opportunities in this field. Board work is an interest of mine, and I hope to expand in this area.”

Olson joined Roche Diagnostics in 1997 as a business development manager and held a number of management positions with increasing responsibility, including vice president of corporate accounts, vice president of marketing and sales of Roche Molecular Diagnostics USA, and head of global market development in Basel, Switzerland. She assumed her most recent role with the company in May 2005.

Tillmann—Olson's successor—joined Roche in 2003 as head of marketing and sales for the company's molecular diagnostics business based in Mannheim, Germany. In 2006, he became head of the company's Asia-Pacific region, where he was responsible for leading the commercial operations of 14 legal entities across 22 markets encompassing more than 2000 employees.

Prior to Roche, Tillmann was managing director at Germany-based biotech company Artus (now part of Qiagen), a leading developer of real-time detection test kits for pathogens based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques.

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