Heather Bresch

Heather Bresch is the CEO of Mylan, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based pharmaceutical corporation that describes itself as the third largest generics and specialty pharmaceutical company in the world.

Career
Bresch's previous roles included serving as Mylan's president, chief operating officer, head of North American operations and chief integration officer. She has been active in attempts to prevent brand-name pharmaceuticals from delaying the release of generic drugs and appeared before a special United States Senate committee on the issue in 2006 and again in 2009. Bresch also testified before the Food and Drug Administration in September 2010 on the issue of generic drug user fees, proposing a new user fee structure that aims to generate more funding for the FDA and provide greater assurance for pharmaceutical product safety, regardless of where in the world the product or its ingredients come from. Also in 2011, Bresch was named one of Pharmaceutical Executive's "Emerging Pharma Leaders 2011."

Controversy

Bresch, the daughter of West Virginia U.S. Senator and former West Virginia governor Joe Manchin, earned her undergraduate degree from West Virginia University. and WVU's provost announced his resignation from that administrative post (while remaining on the faculty). On June 6, 2008, WVU President Michael Garrison resigned in the wake of the scandal.

The university initially stated that it had awarded the degree after correcting a "records error." Bresch claimed in April 2008 that she had arranged with the WVU Business School to have her "work experience" substitute for the outstanding coursework - a claim reportedly denied by the then-head of the MBA program and rejected by the panel. as criticizing the university administration for having made "a 'seriously flawed' decision fraught with favoritism" in awarding Bresch the degree; Michael Garrison, WVU President at the time, was reported to be "a family friend and former business associate of Bresch"

According to the New York Times, Bresch said in a statement that she "continues to believe she did what was required to earn her degree." After WVU announced in February 2009 that it would not rescind other degrees where students' records contained irregularities, Bresch wrote to the university demanding an explanation for what differentiated her situation from the others. The panel investigating the situation had found that "the argument that other WVU students were similarly situated to Ms. Bresch...is not the case" and that some other students' records contained only "a handful of relatively minor administrative problems".