A chance encounter at the grocery store launched Denise Walters' chemistry career. She was working at her job as a grocery store cashier shortly after finishing her undergraduate degree in chemistry, when the wife of the head of the organic synthesis department at A.H. Robbins came through the checkout line. As Walters was ringing up her groceries, the woman told her that there was an opening for a summer position at her husband's company. Walters applied for the job, and was hired that day.
Walters was planning to attend graduate school, so after the summer ended, she began her graduate studies in pharmacy, with a focus on bioanalysis, a new specialization at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her Ph.D. in 1991.
"It was my dream to work for a large company," she says. A.H. Robbins had been bought out by the time she got her degree, so she went to work for Whitby Research, a smaller company in Richmond, VA, doing pharmacokinetics and analytical development work. After a layoff, she moved to Columbus, OH, where she was a Principal Research Scientist at the Battelle Memorial Institute. Five years later, Wyeth Consumer Healthcare was hiring in their Richmond location, and Walters returned to Virginia, where she has had technical leadership positions in various analytical development groups. Pfizer bought Wyeth Consumer Healthcare in 2009.
Today, Walters is Senior Manager for the Global R&D Operations Analytical Team at Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. She is responsible for an eleven-member team that performs analytical method development, validation, transfer, and stability testing for dietary supplements. She also serves on a female leadership committee at Pfizer and she co-chairs her site's wildlife habitat committee. She is especially proud of the wildlife habitat, a program that Pfizer started on their small urban campus in Richmond in 2004. Plantings on the campus attract birds and insects, and wild turkeys and deer have been sighted. The committee also organizes an annual Earth Day program.