Ken Wilke

Ken is a respected industry professional with more than 30 years of experience in R&D strategy & operations, project management, and real estate development. Prior to joining CBRE, Ken held Director level roles at Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson. In addition, he founded and served as Principal of the consulting firm BioStrategy Solutions, LLC.

Ken brings a holistic perspective to life sciences engagements, combining extensive experience in engineering and capital projects with an in-depth understanding of biopharma R&D processes and functions. Ken's design and construction management experience spans a wide variety of life sciences facility types, including laboratory; vivarium; pilot plant; chemical, pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing; and infrastructure projects. In addition, Ken has extensive experience with facility benchmarking and development of design standards. At Merck, Ken supported a multi-hundred-million-dollar annual global R&D capital plan, assuring design quality across all projects prior to final funding, as well as directly managing design teams on key projects. These projects included developing new R&D sites for Merck in Boston, San Diego and Seattle. The Seattle project, a 135,000 square-foot genomics research facility, was completed with an aggressive 9-month construction schedule and was recognized with a safety performance award from the Construction Industry Institute.

Ken’s R&D strategy and operations experience includes budgeting, resource planning, portfolio management, IT systems development, change management and strategic communications for functions such as high-throughput screening, translational medicine, clinical specimen management and clinical pharmacogenomics. His experience includes acquisition integration, divestitures, and CDMO/CRO management. His projects include a facility and operations assessment of Merck’s Vaccine Clinical Assay function and ultimate outsourcing of this function to a CRO. He has been a featured speaker at industry conferences including the Pharma IQ Biobanking Conference (London), Asia Pacific Research Ethics Conference (Singapore) and the Quorum Review Big Data and the IRB Conference (Boston).