Grace Niwa is Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition, Talent Intelligence and Early Career at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. In this role, she provides strategic leadership across Talent Acquisition, Executive Search, Talent Intelligence, Early and Emerging Talent and TA Global Operations.
Prior to this role, Grace was Vice President of Talent Acquisition and Executive Search at Flagship Pioneering where she was responsible for building the Talent Acquisition function from scratch, developing, driving and executing the recruiting and hiring process across the Flagship enterprise.
Prior to joining Flagship, Grace was a key member of the Global Executive Search team at Biogen, an in-house function that managed searches for Biogen’s top executives, where she served as an expert on biotech/pharma market trends and drove recruitment process across the company’s global footprint. Throughout her career, Grace has hired high-performing, C-level talent for a wide variety of organizations across industries, including private equity and venture capital portfolio companies, top NGOs, foundations and public companies. Prior to entering the field of executive search, Grace spent 12 years as founder & principal of Niwa PR, a public relations and marketing agency for multinational corporations, institutions and nonprofit organizations, with clients including Wells Fargo, AARP, Anheuser-Busch, GlaxoSmithKline and many others.
A former concert pianist, Grace received her B.A. from the University of Toronto and her Master’s of Music in piano performance from The Juilliard School.
