Vanessa is leading the Group Legal department at Merck KGaA. In this role, Vanessa is responsible together with her team to provide business enabling support to senior management on all corporate and capital market law matters incl. board management and to all Group functions at Merck for instance M&A, MVentures, HR, IT, Sustainability, Procurement. Vanessa is for nearly 10 years with Merck and had the great opportunity to get to know the company from different perspectives: Vanessa started in October 2013 in the Healthcare Legal team where she held several global, regional and local positions along the whole drug life cycle incl. R&D, Medical, Commercial and Market Access. In 2019, she moved to Compliance as Head of the Compliance Center of Expertise, responsible for the global Compliance portfolio at Merck and supporting the Data Privacy Transformation Project. Prior to joining Merck, Vanessa worked for Clifford Chance as Associate in the Healthcare and Life-Science Practice Group for nearly 5 years.