meet Giel | Roche

Around ten years ago, I told a friend that I was born to improve healthcare. Fast forward, it still remains what drives me to go to work every day and fortunately enough, I have always been empowered to bring such life mission into reality.

The journey dates back to my 27th birthday when I had a fantastic interview with Roche UK and decided to leave my home country, the Netherlands, for a career overseas. My scope back then was to provide application, hardware and software support on Roche analyzers which played a critical role at hospitals and clinics. I commenced the position right after an intensive training period and worked to ensure all these instruments up and running so that healthcare professionals could deliver timely diagnosis to patients. It was certainly an interesting and meaningful learning curve.

Following two years’ building on expertise in a very fast way while discovering the British culture, an opportunity arose so I moved again - this time to our Roche Regional Customer Support Center RCSC in Mannheim (Germany). There, I got integrated into a site of more than 8,000 colleagues and furthered my career by becoming an Application Expert advising laboratories in five countries. Simply put, I am a trusted partner to the labs whenever they face difficulties with Roche medical equipment. My "home base" as such changed from the UK to Germany, yet the focus remains the same: healthcare professionals and, at the end of the day, patients. It's great that I have been always in the position to help so many patients and improve healthcare day after day.

Our impact

Most of the customers who contact me are under stress about something: a reagent, a software program, or an instrument that doesn’t work. Therefore, I appreciate that Roche has given a medical biologist like me much freedom to come up with ideas to maximize every workflow, which in the end would benefit the patients.

It’s rewarding to solve challenging problems using the power of Biomedical Science and Engineering on my role - but it’s even a better feeling knowing that at the end of the day, the machine I help fix will continue running thousands of tests for patients who would otherwise have to wait with a heavy heart until they could receive the right diagnosis or treatment.

The place to Work

At Roche and our RCSC in Mannheim, we don’t have a normal nine to five job. We have lots of diversity in our day-to-day tasks which make our team a great place to work. I am now based in Mannheim - the third biggest campus of Roche which has been witnessing a big transformation in recent years. Because new healthcare products are constantly added to our pipeline, and RCSC is where we gain first-hand exposure to such technologies, I cannot think of a better place for an engineer to start his career and acquire hands-on MedTech knowledge in a better way.

Our culture

No one here is ever left out to struggle alone.

The journey with Roche over the past six years has given me chances to cross paths with countless colleagues around the world. What is interesting is, every country I have visited or supported - from South Africa to the UK, from the United Arab Emirates to Finland - I am always impressed by the integrity, the courage and the passion my colleagues demonstrate. Our mission is to help a large number of laboratories run efficiently across four continents (Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America). Getting there certainly doesn’t come easy, so we know the right way to go is staying close as a team and collaborating in an environment where every question is appreciated, best practices are shared, and where we know by heart that no one is ever left out to struggle alone.

It’s also extremely fun sometimes after work when we end up at a restaurant or bar, start to talk off-topic and build new memories. I feel honored to be part of this “Roche family”.