But eventually, they convinced me to do it and it was always my idea that for me, it would be kind of a sabbatical. I will go to make a small break in the industry and then come back to what I really love doing, which was teaching and researching in academia.
But I didn’t take into consideration that months after I joined Pfizer, I fell in love with the company and fell in love with what they are doing. I fell in love with the private sector because I saw how dynamic it is and how you can make a difference over there. I’ve stayed twenty-eight, so far, twenty-eight years with the company, and I stayed three of them in Greece. The other twenty-five years I spent internationally.
The job was in Athens, so to join Pfizer I did the first relocation, which I found very difficult to do, from Thessaloniki to Athens. I followed other eight relocations. Together with my wife, we lived in different cities in five different countries. That was an extremely interesting experience. In most of them our kids had to follow because they were born.
That’s, I think, is the biggest gift I gave them, the fact that they were exposed to different cultures, to different civilizations, to understand that diversity is very important and to understand that the world is not how it looks in New York or in Texas or in Atlanta. The world is very different in every single corner of this Earth. I think that was very, very important.
