What began with a degree in pharmacy in Bangladesh has evolved into a multidisciplinary journey spanning pharmaceutical supply chains, hospital pharmacy, business administration, academic research and artificial intelligence.
At the centre of this journey is Pooja Roy, a Bangladeshi professional and researcher who is now pursuing the final stage of her Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) in the United States, while exploring how emerging technologies can address practical challenges in healthcare.
Roy’s career reflects a growing intersection between healthcare and technology—an area where professionals with both domain knowledge and technological understanding are increasingly seeking new solutions.
From pharmacy to the pharmaceutical industry
Roy completed her B.Pharm and M.Pharm in Bangladesh before earning an MBA. Her early professional experience was in the pharmaceutical sector, where she spent around three and a half years in the supply chain department of a USFDA-approved pharmaceutical company.
The experience gave her an insight into a side of healthcare that is often less visible to patients: ensuring that medicines and pharmaceutical products are available where and when they are needed.
She later moved to the United States and gained experience in hospital pharmacy as a Pharmacy Technician at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center.
These experiences across pharmaceutical supply chains and hospital pharmacy eventually influenced her interest in combining healthcare knowledge with business strategy and technology.
A new direction: Artificial Intelligence in healthcare
While continuing her doctoral studies, Roy began focusing increasingly on artificial intelligence and healthcare management.
Her academic interests include AI in healthcare, explainable machine learning, early disease detection, clinical decision-making and healthcare management.
One of her research projects, “Deep Learning-Based Automated Diabetic Retinopathy Lesion Segmentation: A Systematic Comparison,” has been presented at a conference.
She is also working on a research paper titled “Explainable Machine Learning for Early Disease Detection: A Trust-Calibrated Framework Balancing Predictive Performance and Clinical Interpretability.”
The research reflects a central question in modern healthcare AI: how can artificial intelligence become not only powerful, but also understandable and trustworthy for healthcare professionals?
From an idea to Pharmacophore AI
Perhaps the most distinctive part of Roy’s recent work is Pharmacophore AI, a web-based platform developed around pharmacy inventory management.
The idea grew from her understanding of pharmacy operations and pharmaceutical supply chains. The platform is intended to facilitate pharmacies in managing inventory more efficiently and using technology to support better operational decision-making.
For Roy, the project represents more than an application of artificial intelligence. It is an attempt to connect her professional experience with a technology-driven solution to a practical problem in pharmacy management.
Her background in pharmaceutical supply chain management provides the industry perspective, while her DBA studies and AI-related academic work provide a business and technological framework.
Research beyond one discipline
Roy's research portfolio also extends beyond artificial intelligence.
Her work includes “When Antifungals Attack: Terbinafine Associated Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (TTP),” which she says has been published in a Q1 journal.
Another research project, “Purchasing Behavior and Customers’ Response to the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Factors of the Pharmaceutical Products in Bangladesh,” examines consumer behaviour surrounding pharmaceutical products in Bangladesh.
Together, these projects demonstrate the breadth of her interests—from drug-related clinical research to pharmaceutical markets and, more recently, AI-driven healthcare innovation.
A multidisciplinary path
Roy's professional trajectory does not fit neatly into a single category.
She is a pharmacist by education, has experience in pharmaceutical supply chain operations and hospital pharmacy, holds business-management training, and is now completing doctoral-level education while working on AI and healthcare research.
That combination has shaped her approach to innovation.
As healthcare systems around the world increasingly adopt artificial intelligence, the ability to understand both technology and the realities of healthcare delivery is becoming increasingly valuable.
For Bangladesh, where the pharmaceutical industry is one of the country's major industrial sectors, the development of professionals who can connect pharmaceutical expertise with emerging technologies could create opportunities for innovation in areas ranging from inventory management to healthcare analytics.
Roy's journey from pharmacy education in Bangladesh to healthcare and technology-focused work in the United States offers one example of how traditional healthcare expertise can evolve alongside emerging technology.
The next chapter of her career may determine how far that intersection of pharmacy, business and artificial intelligence can go.
For Roy, however, the direction appears clear: using technology not simply to follow the future of healthcare, but to help build it.
