Regulatory Open Forum

16 April – 20 April is Volunteer Appreciation Week. RAPS is recognizing some of its wonderful volunteers for all their dedication and hard work over the past year and beyond. Get to know them each day this week with a fun Q + A below and check out RAPS Volunteer Program to learn more and get involved.

Gert Bos

• What do you love about the regulatory profession? What keeps me excited about regulatory science is that is moves on the frontier of innovations, supporting new therapies to be made available to those that need it. Not one product, but many different ones, in many clinical fields. Enabling these developments to continue, whilst ensuring full regulatory compliance is always a fine balance between over the top compliance and a practical approach to keep thing simple and doable.

• What would we find on your desk right now? As we just moved into our completely refurbished office yesterday, you will see the flowers put there by the office designer; but despite the clean desk policy I left some stuff on the table: a Chinese tea cup, a RAPS NL Chapter coffee mug, and a RAPS volunteer water mug.

• What is the best business travel advice you've ever received? The "rule of 3", picked up a long time ago on one of many 14 hour flights from Amsterdam to Japan: When crossing time-zones during the day: SLEEP 1/3 of the total time in a plane, WORK 1/3 and relax 1/3, and you'll be able to forget about any jet-lag. When crossing time-zones during a night flight: RELAX/eat/drink the first 1/6, then SLEEP 2/3, then RELAX/eat/drink the last 1/6, and forget about WORK.

• What does being a RAPS volunteer mean to you? It gives me the opportunity to speak to and exchange ideas with peers, both on regulatory sciences, as well as in some cases on more personal matters. In addition it allows me to give something back to the community that brought me much free advice when I was starting in the field.

• What are you most looking forward to this year? As always, the many short and long holidays with my family, cultural visits with friends, and the weekend evenings cooking diner for friends and family, to balance out the days away from them when I'm travelling the world to conferences, training sessions, steering committees, strategic advice sessions and all the fun parts of the regulatory job.