Wells International Foundation Founder & CEO Monique Y. Wells Celebrates 25 Years of Life in Paris

PARIS - June 6, 2017 - PRLog -- Dr. Monique Y. Wells, Founder and CEO of the Wells International Foundation (WIF), celebrates 25 years of living in Paris, France on June 6, 2017.  She credits her experiences as a denizen of the City of Light for inspiring her to include the "I" for "international" in the name of her U.S. non-profit organization.

Dr. Wells is a veterinary pathologist and toxicologist from Houston, TX who moved to Paris in 1992 to work for Rhône-Poulenc Rorer (RPR), a drug company formed from the merger of the French chemical and pharmaceutical giant Rhône-Poulenc and the smaller U.S. company, Rorer Pharmaceuticals.  She worked in RPR's drug safety division for six years before moving to the Centre de Recherche Charles Zviak at L'Oréal to serve as the company's only veterinary pathologist for several years.  In 2002, she took a sabbatical to create a business – a preclinical safety consultancy – and has never looked back.

Dr. Wells' plunge into the entrepreneurial arena is what led her to found the Wells International Foundation and to select the organization's six Strategic Focus Areas (SFAs) of service.  The recession of 2008 / 2009 devastated her consultancy's client base and she turned to training and mentoring as a means of earning a living while waiting for economy to rebound.  She initially focused on time management training for her preclinical safety colleagues and later expanded her client base and the scope of her training to provide productivity and life balance mentoring for women entrepreneurs in all domains.  This experience led her to create WIF's Women's Empowerment SFA.

Dr. Wells' career as a preclinical safety professional has taken her all over Europe as well as to India, Singapore, China, and Indonesia.  Her work with her husband in their travel service, Discover Paris! (http://www.discoverparis.net), has provided opportunities to interact with study abroad groups in Paris since 2001.  These experiences inspired her to create WIF's Travel / Study Abroad SFA.

While researching information for Discover Paris!, Dr. Wells learned about Beauford Delaney, a figurative and Abstract Expressionist artist who lived in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1979.  Her passion for Delaney's life and art inspired her to organize a solo exhibition of his work in Paris in 2016.  She invited a student group from the University of Arizona to come to Paris to create a digital application based on the artist's work and partnered with a social entrepreneurship called J Rêve International to bring K-12 educators from the U.S. for professional development on integrating the arts into the teaching of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).  The exhibition was WIF's inaugural event and it interwove the non-profit's Travel / Study Abroad SFA with two other SFAs – The Arts and STEAM Education.

WIF's Literacy SFA focuses on inspiring K-Grade 3 African-American children in Houston to learn to read and to love reading.  WIF is partnering with Put It In A Book Foundation and other organizations to coordinate events and giveaways that will expose children to ideas that will encourage them to want to travel and to consider life sciences as a career option. "I owe who I am, why I live where I live, and why I do what I do to the books I read as a child," she says.

Finally, WIF's Preclinical Safety Training SFA addresses Dr. Wells' desire to provide training and mentoring for preclinical safety professionals in emerging nations.  Inspired by a lengthy project in India that resulted in the building of a new animal facility, the publication of several scientific papers, and numerous rich professional interactions, she seeks to collaborate with institutions around the world that can benefit from the customized scientific and technical teams she brings together to support their needs.

Dr. Wells looks forward to continuing WIF's service from her Paris base.  She eagerly anticipates her next 25 years there!

For more information about the Wells International Foundation, visit http://wellsinternationalfoundation.org