She starts on May 1 as senior vice president for worldwide policy. And it’s not your usual keep-after-the-folks-in-the-Beltway type of job. Slater will have a chance to take a big picture view of issues and help Pfizer reposition itself.

“It’s going to be a broad position,” Slater tellls Pharmalot. “And it’s going to be very challenging, because it’s all about how a company organizes itself for the future. I think they’re interested in change and I know when I met with them, I used that word a lot.”

The move will also be a big change for Slater, a Columbia University-trained physician who spent 17 years at Merck, where she held a number of positions, starting with senior director of biochemical endcrinology and finishing as vice president of corporate public affairs. Along the way, she supervised worldwide regulatory activities for all Merck medicines.

She left just as Merck entered its now infamous decline and, in 2001, was named assistant secretary of health for HHS, where she stayed until 2003. Since then, Slater tooled around suburban New Jersey, where she lives, doing consulting work and serving on the boards of several small companies, such as VaxGen, Phase Forward and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

“I could’ve continued to do what I was doing, but this is too challenging,” she says while riding an Amtrak to Washington, DC, this afternoon. “And it’s the only kind of challenge, honestly, that would bring me back to big pharma.”

[tags]Eve Slater, Merck, Pfizer[/tags]