Pauline Dufresne
Chief People Officer Bicara Therapeutics
Pauline Dufresne is Chief People Officer at Bicara Therapeutics, a fast-growing, pre-commercial oncology biotech, where she sits on the Executive Team and leads the people function. Before joining Bicara in 2025, she was Vice President, People at X4 Pharmaceuticals, guiding the organization’s HR function through its transition from pre-commercial to commercial. Earlier, she spent nearly six years as a Global HR Business Partner at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, and held HR roles at AREVA in France. Pauline is passionate about leadership, culture, and change management, and serves on the board of the Community Music Center of Boston.
Seminars
- How do you formalize the culture that got you here, capturing years of unwritten values built through rapid, founder-led growth, without losing what made the company special in the first place?
- Learn how Bicara Therapeutics took a bottoms-up approach to defining its values, involving every employee in the process, then brought the resulting values (Powered by People for Patients, Adaptive Momentum, and Candour that Elevates) to life through a personality assessment that gave each person a persona, and a values-themed bingo game designed to help colleagues with different personas connect
- Discover how this approach helped sustain zero employee turnover and industry-leading engagement scores through a period of intense growth, while supporting a time-to-hire under 40 days (against an industry average of around 90) and recognition as a top workplace
This interactive Q&A asks what makes a values framework change day-to-day behavior rather than sit on a wall.
- Embedding values into business practices, not just branding
- Taking a bottoms-up approach to defining culture
- Reinforcing values through performance and recognition processes
