Judith Carol Lewent is a business executive who served as

chief financial officer The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financ ...

of Merck & Co. from 1990 until her retirement from the company in 2007. Since her retirement from Merck, she has continued to serve on multiple corporate boards, including the boards of

GlaxoSmithKline GSK plc, formerly GlaxoSmithKline plc, is a British multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with global headquarters in London, England. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. GSK is the ten ...

, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Motorola Solutions. She also served on the board of Purdue Pharma until her departure from the company in 2014.

Early life

Lewent received her high school diploma at

Hunter College High School Hunter College High School is a secondary school located in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is administered by Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Hunter is publicly funded, and there i ...

, her

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

Economics Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...

from Goucher College, and her S.M. in 1972 from the

MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, ...

with thesis titled ''The French Open-end Investment Companies (1964 to 1971): an Application of the Capital Asset Pricing Model''.

Career

Joining Merck in 1980, Lewent developed a new planning model in 1983 based on the

Monte Carlo method Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determi ...

, as more traditional financial valuation methods seemed not to take account of the long-term nature of pharmaceutical risks. In 1990, on her appointment as CFO, Lewent took on responsibilities for Merck's overall financial and strategic development, and for licensing matters. Since then Lewent has also been responsible for Merck's collaboration with

Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is an American multinational corporation founded in 1886 that develops medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods. Its common stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the company i ...

in a consumer pharmaceuticals joint venture, for the setting up of the animal health company

Merial Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health is a multinational animal health company, formed in January 2017 when Merial was acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim and merged with Boehringer Ingelheim's existing animal health assets. Overview In August 1997, ...

(a joint venture with the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis), and for Merck's ongoing relationships with AstraZeneca and

DuPont DuPont de Nemours, Inc., commonly shortened to DuPont, is an American multinational chemical company first formed in 1802 by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours. The company played a major role in ...

. She chaired the governing boards of several of these joint ventures. Lewent is a member of the

board of directors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organiz ...

Dell Inc. Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data s ...

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent p ...

and the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund; she is also a life member of the

MIT Corporation The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, and a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

. Between 26 July and 07 Aug 2007, Lewent sold 200,000 shares of Merck stock for about $10,262,000, according to

Securities and Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...

filings. In February 2007, Merck has announced she will retire and leave the company in July.

External links

BusinessWeek: Executive Profile

Merck's Judy Lewent: Once Again, Talking about the Future

* ttps://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/AFX-0013-18695500.htm CNNMoney.com: Merck CFO Sells 63,000 Shares of Stock
Yahoo! Finance: Insider Filings

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lewent, Judy Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) American women business executives American business executives Hunter College High School alumni MIT Sloan School of Management alumni Goucher College alumni GSK plc people American chief financial officers Women chief financial officers 21st-century American women