She warned a costly project was failing - then says HR was drawn into her exit
A former AstraZeneca executive says the drugmaker's own HR team helped push her out after she reported concerns at work.
The former vice president, who worked in AstraZeneca's BioPharmaceutical Development group, sued the company in Maryland federal court on August 4, 2026, alleging retaliation, sex discrimination, and unpaid wages. According to the complaint, she led a global team of about 170 scientists and engineers from 2022 until she was terminated on February 26, 2025.
Her lawsuit describes two sets of concerns that, she alleges, overlapped. In one, she says she warned that a costly new manufacturing process was not working, and that the project's leaders were "misrepresenting the data" to senior management as the company weighed spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new Maryland plant. In the other, she says she reported that a senior male scientist was mistreating women and took part in a Human Resources investigation into those complaints.
For HR professionals, the timeline is central to the claim. The former executive alleges she raised her concerns about the manufacturing process at an October 2024 meeting. Days later, according to the filing, her supervisor accused her of being unprofessional at that meeting - an accusation she says was false - and began asking her colleagues about her conduct, something she describes as "a fishing expedition to dig up dirt."
Human Resources...
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