Mary Ellen Clark

Mary Ellen Clark is currently the Executive Director of the Central New Jersey WIRED Bio-1 initiative. The $5.1 million grant is the third WIRED (Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development) grant from the federal Department of Labor received by New Jersey and focuses on retaining and expanding high quality jobs in Central New Jersey in the biosciences sector, to enable Central New Jersey to remain competitive globally. Strategies range from exciting young people about the biosciences focusing on underrepresented groups and laying smooth education and career pathways to increasing bioscience workforce development through targeted training and transformational graduate programs. 

Mary Ellen comes to Bio-1 from Johnson and Johnson, where her most recent role was as Director within the Global Program Management group of Information Technology Services, responsible for customer project delivery. Prior to this position, she was the Process Excellence Leader for the Information Management and Finance functions, responsible for the deployment of Process Excellence, J&J's Six Sigma program throughout the global Information Management and Finance communities. In this role, she was a founding member of the Dashboard Subject Matter expert team, developing a standard dashboard methodology and world-wide training program.  Mary Ellen has trained over 1,000 individuals on how to create a dashboard and held over 50 dashboard workshops with various organizations.

Previous work experience includes the 26 years in the Information Technology field in the Pharmaceutical, Forest Products and Agrichemicals industries as well as consulting and teaching. Mary Ellen is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt.  She holds an M.S. in Management Systems Analysis, a technical certificate in Computer Programming as well as a B.A. with General Honors in Music Education from Douglass College.