What Drives Vertex CEO and President Reshma Kewalramani
Alum and BU’s 2026 Commencement speaker has dedicated her career to discovering and developing new medicines that change patients’ lives
“I’m super excited to come back to my BU stomping grounds,” says Reshma Kewalramani (CAS’98, CAMED’98). “I have so much love for the institution, and I’m very excited to meet the students and congratulate them on their graduation.” Photo courtesy of Vertex
What Drives Vertex CEO and President Reshma Kewalramani
Alum and BU’s 2026 Commencement speaker has dedicated her career to discovering and developing new medicines that change patients’ lives
As CEO and president of the global biotechnology company Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Reshma Kewalramani has spoken with many patients whose lives have been drastically improved by the company’s treatments.
She recalls a conversation with a mother whose daughter died of cystic fibrosis before Vertex’s breakthrough drug Trikafta turned the once-debilitating lung disease into a manageable condition for many.
“The mom would call and yell at me,” says Kewalramani (CAS’98, CAMED’98). “She said, ‘I’ve already lost my daughter. I will not lose my son. You have to go faster than you think you can.’”
The company did move quickly. Trikafta was developed in just under 4 years, far faster than the typical 15-year industry timeline, Kewalramani says. “Every time we thought, ‘This is a hard thing, how are we going to do this?’ But you hear the mom’s voice, and she’s already lost one child, and she’s not going to lose another. You find a way forward.”
For Kewalramani, who’s dedicated her career to developing life-changing medicines, the story captures what’s at stake in her work as a physician, scientist, and CEO.
She will bring that perspective to Boston University’s 153rd Commencement on Sunday, May 17, when she delivers the address on Nickerson Field. The announcement was made at this year’s Senior Breakfast on May 1.
“I’m super excited to come back to my BU stomping grounds,” says Kewalramani. “I have so much love for the institution, and I’m very excited to meet the students and congratulate them on their graduation.” She will receive a Doctor of Science honorary degree.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Kewalramani graduated from BU with a combined BA and MD through the now-ended seven-year accelerated undergrad and medical school program. She trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and completed a nephrology fellowship through the Massachusetts General Hospital-Brigham and Women’s Hospital program.
While working as a transplant nephrologist studying kidney disease early in her career at Boston-area hospitals, she received a job offer from drug developer Amgen in California and moved across the country with her husband, Abhijit Kulkarni (ENG’93,’97), and their then six-month-old twin boys. She rose through Amgen’s ranks and, in 2017, joined Vertex. There, she was chief medical officer and executive vice president of global medicines development and medical affairs, before becoming CEO in 2020.
Based in Boston’s Seaport, Vertex has several approved medicines that treat the underlying causes of cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, the genetic blood disorder transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia, and acute pain. It has also been named one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For.
For her leadership and contributions to science and innovation, Kewalramani has received worldwide recognition, appearing on Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025 and 2026 Women of the Year lists, on Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful People in Business list in 2025, and on Boston magazine’s newly published Most Influential Bostonians 2026 list.
From BU, she’s received a 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor the Boston University Alumni Association bestows on alums, and the 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award from the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. She’s also a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at the medical school.
Bostonia interviewed Kewalramani about her memories of her time on campus, her company’s work creating groundbreaking medicine, and the lessons she shares with young people and scientists.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q&A
with Reshma Kewalramani
Bostonia: You graduated from BU’s seven-year accelerated undergrad and medical school program. How did that experience shape you?
Kewalramani: I was 17 when I came to Boston and BU, and spent my formative years here. BU is incredibly special because it has made me who I am today. I left at 24 as a doctor. I met my husband here, I met some of my lifelong friends here. I got my first lab job that paid here at BU, and I got my first grant in the sciences here at BU. It leaves a lasting impression on you in terms of how to think about people, how to give back, how to grow and learn, how to do things the right way, and how to expect life to work.
BU is an urban institution. There is a lot going on. All of the parts and pieces you need for success are here, but nothing is handed to you on a silver platter. You have to find dots and connect them. You have to find mentors, places to do your research…and drive it forward. And I think that’s a valuable lesson for life. BU just naturally does it, because it’s such a big urban institution, but I think it’s kind of the best place to grow up.
Bostonia: What was your reaction to the Time honors, and what do they mean to you?
Kewalramani: Genuine surprise. You certainly feel a sense of pride. I am old enough and therefore wise enough to know that these recognitions are not actually about me. They are genuinely about the institutions that I’ve worked at and the people that I work with. They’re about the medicines that we have made. You may need a single embodiment of that [work], because you can’t recognize thousands of people, and so when you sit in the [CEO] seat, maybe the recognition comes to you. But I am smart enough to know that it’s not me—it’s this company, it’s the people, and it’s the medicines we make.
Bostonia: When you became CEO and president of Vertex, you were the first woman to lead a large, publicly traded US biotech company. Do you think of yourself as a trailblazer? How do you feel about that word?
Kewalramani: No. I think of myself as a mom, a doctor, a wife, a daughter. I’m a scientist, certainly, someone who has a lot of responsibility to patients, our employees, our stakeholders. But no, I don’t see myself as a trailblazer. And one of the most interesting things is, I don’t actually see myself as a woman CEO—I just see myself as a CEO. So trailblazing has nothing to do with it.
I’m thinking about going home to walk my dog, the meetings I have tomorrow, and the data we’ll be looking at. Are the medicines getting to patients? Are we doing enough to nurture our people and our culture? That’s what’s going through my mind.
Bostonia: You were a nephrologist before moving into the pharmaceutical industry. How did that clinical work inform your leadership today?
Kewalramani: I work in the biopharmaceutical industry, and, at our core, we make medicines for patients. I think there is a very special responsibility and perspective that you bring to this role, if you happen to be a physician-scientist by background, because you have a very intimate knowledge and relationship to patients. You have a very deep understanding of what it takes to bring a potential idea, a potential molecule, from the lab all the way through preclinical development, clinical development through regulatory and manufacturing, and then eventually you have access for patients.
I think the physician-scientist is uniquely capable of understanding that full journey, but importantly, [they understand] what it’s going to mean for patients and their families. And what it ends up doing is, it makes you particularly rigorous, diligent, and driven to move fast and ensure that we bring the very best medicines to patients who are waiting. And then when we do all that work, we really focus on access. Sometimes, the medicines that we bring just change the practice of medicine.
Bostonia: Can you give an example of this?
One of the medicines we developed [Casgevy] with our partners at CRISPR Therapeutics is based on CRISPR-Cas9. These are the molecular scissors. Basically, we take blood out of a patient and plasma freeze [it]. We take their own bone marrow cells, gene-edit them, and then give them back to the patient. And the clinical trials show that the patients with sickle cell disease who are having these [extremely painful vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs)] go to having no VOCs—90-plus percent of patients don’t have any.
When you do that, you’re inventing this entirely new procedure. The physicians and institutions have to learn how to do the plasmapheresis [the process of obtaining plasma from blood] for this disease, which is a bit different than plasmapheresis for other diseases. They have to go through the qualification process of sending us the cells with good quality at the right time, with what’s called “chain of command” and “chain of custody.” We have to make sure we return those cells to you. It can’t go back to anybody else. And we have to learn how to do myeloablation [a critical step prior to stem cell transplantation], so that your body can receive these cells.
That’s a lot of invention of not just the medicine, but also the processes and even things that may sound pedestrian, like shipping routes. How do we make sure [these cells] get to you at the right temperature, at the right pressure, so that they come to you in the way that it’s intended? This sort of access to medicine is critically important, especially when you start getting to very advanced therapies like cell therapy or gene editing.
Bostonia: Vertex is known for its work in cystic fibrosis, CRISPR-based gene editing therapies, and a new class of non-opioid pain medicines. How are you building on these breakthroughs to address other serious diseases?
One of the most important things to share is that, when you do research in the biomedical field and you do drug development, it is a very long cycle and it’s fraught with failure. In our industry, 1 out of 10 projects we start in the lab actually becomes medicine. So you have to be very used to failing and the process taking a long time, which leads to the other truth: no one person does it alone, and you stand on the shoulders of giants.
My predecessor CEO here, a physician-scientist by the name of Jeffrey Leiden, was the one who actually set the strategy in 2013–2014. The strategy is to make transformative medicines—not incremental improvements—that either transform the disease or cure the disease. We do that in a very specific way: we go after diseases with high unmet need, where we understand the causal human biology.
All of this is meant to [address] that problem in our industry of high failure rates and drive that success rate higher. That is the fundamental magic of what we do at Vertex, and that was on the shoulders of the giant who came before me.
Today, we use that same approach, and it’s a collective effort of the 6,500 or so Vertexians who work here. We are incredibly focused on doing one thing and doing it very well: inventing medicines that are transformative, if not curative, for patients.
Bostonia: What do you see as the biggest challenge in leading a major biopharmaceutical company today?
There are a lot of challenges to leading a large enterprise today, because knowledge and technology are moving at a lightning pace. In my industry, it’s the pace of drug discovery, of tech—large language models and AI—and [thinking about] the good it could do. So it’s not just that things are moving fast, [new knowledge and technology] could also revolutionize how we do our work—if not for efficiency, then for innovation.
And I think that is a challenge for everyone. But I would say, for our industry in particular, the biggest challenge remains the same: the very low success rates when we go from the bench to the bedside. In terms of translating our basic science discoveries into medicines, [that process] is fraught with failure. It is long and incredibly expensive. If we could get those measures down, boy, we could do a lot more for patients.
Bostonia: What advice do you have for young people who are just starting a new chapter in their lives?
My biggest piece of advice is a very simple thing to say, but I think it is very hard to do: show up physically in the real world. Come to your office, your class, your lab. Don’t do things by Zoom. Make connections in the real world. Ask for help and put yourself out there.