Andrea Harding

Project and Administrative Coordinator

Andrea recently entered the higher education field when she joined BIFE in a project and administrative assistant role. Prior to joining the IFE, she spent over 20 years managing small- and large-scale operations in academic medicine, small animal medicine, and clinical research. 

Her management roles afforded her opportunities to lead an employment division of a 1200-bed hospital in the Midwest and then using that experience to move from ancillary services to clinical services within the Harvard Medical School system, where she ran the business side of cardiovascular medicine for one of the teaching hospitals. Her exposure to clinical operations in invasive and non-invasive cardiology as well as NIH and private research operations opened up the next avenue of her career development within a clinical research organization. There she helped to lead the data management process for five national and international clinical trials which ultimately led to the award of a new $10M contract.

Opting to have more family time, Andrea turned her focus away from large scale operations to smaller, more localized business. She followed her passion for animal rescue work by going to work for a small veterinary practice nearby her home. She was able to bring business process, budgetary skills and a strong belief in the value for continuing education to her new role as a Practice Manager where all aspects of business were within her scope of oversight. This included budgetary, marketing, client satisfaction, clinical program development and human resource management. In her willingness to risk taking on a totally different career challenge, the clinic was owned by a doctor who had a family philanthropic foundation and owned five small practices. She turned the one in Weston where she worked from a failing practice to a flourishing one, growing it to 3.9M and she took another practice not meeting its potential and more than doubled its growth while adding new services and specialty surgery.

Through her managerial background and previous professional development, she helped grow the 5 practices to 14 practices, hired and trained all new managers, developed a management succession plan that was predicated on grooming present employees for internal upward mobility as well as designed an annual educational program sponsored by industry leaders to bring forward timely and meaningful continuing education for credit towards veterinary and certified technicians’ licensure. These programs also helped managers remain current on timely business and clinical changes occurring within the field. This program was hosted several times through Babson’s Executive Ed facility.

Now a member of the BIFE administrative team, Andrea has taken on special projects and administrative support designed to help BIFE continue its expansion of offerings as it grows in scope and national/international recognition. Her BA is in Mass Communications from Emerson College and her MS is in Administrative Services from Boston College.