Miguel Cerezo, Board Member, Treasurer

Miguel Cerezo is currently the Facilities and Engineering Site Head at Kite Pharma’s flagship T-Cell therapy commercial manufacturing facility (TCF03) in El Segundo, California. He has responsibility for all engineering, maintenance, construction project management, calibration and EHS operations at the site. He joined Kite in 2018 serving as Head of Facilities, Engineering and Operations for Kite’s network of Research, Development and Clinical Manufacturing Centers located in Santa Monica and Emeryville, CA as well as in Gaithersburg, MD. 

Prior to this, Miguel was a founding Engineering Technical Director in Amgen’s Corporate Engineering Technical Authority. As the recognized company subject matter expert in the fields of Instrumentation, Measurement, Reliability and Controls, he led a team of 4 engineers and 10 other technical staff and was responsible for company-wide ownership and establishment of Engineering Standards, Specifications and Maintenance Requirements for Instrumentation and Controls. Miguel was Amgen’s Corporate Calibration and Maintenance Quality Process Owner, its Maintenance and Operations Global Network Leader, and served in the capacity of its Chief Metrologist. Also, he was the corporate business process owner of Amgen’s global instance Maximo engineering asset management system.

Upon coming to Amgen in 1996, he proceeded to quickly advance in escalating levels of management responsibility within the Thousand Oaks Site Facilities and Engineering organization, culminating in becoming Director of Facilities and Engineering, where he oversaw all aspects of F&E operations at Amgen’s Thousand Oaks (ATO) headquarters facility. As the ATO Site F&E Head, Miguel led an organization of 130 staff members and was accountable for all organizational activities including safety, compliance, operations, budgeting ($55M expense and $40M capital annually), and staffing of multiple departments including Engineering, Site Project Management, Work Order Planning and Administration, Site Utilities and Operations, Maintenance, and Instrumentation.

Prior to joining Amgen, Miguel spent 10 years at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) under contract with NASA, where he began his technical career in the Earth Orbiting Systems Group focusing on the development and worldwide field operation of precision sub-centimeter accuracy GPS receivers and microwave water vapor radiometers used in tectonic geodesy and very long baseline interferometry. Subsequently, Miguel was a member of the technical staff in the JPL Instrumentation Section, where he developed and implemented testing and calibration solutions for the Spacecraft Environmental Testing Laboratory and the Metrology Standards Laboratory. During this time, he contributed to the mission success of many NASA space flight projects including Galileo, Cassini, Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera, Mars Pathfinder, Sojourner Mars Rover, and TOPEX/Poseidon, among many others. Additionally, Miguel had primary responsibility for the Active Cavity Radiometer Pyrheliometer system that was deployed to the World Radiation Center in Davos, Switzerland, to establish and maintain the World Radiometric Reference for solar irradiation measurements.

A fixture in professional societies and industry forums with numerous published technical papers and presentations to his credit, including contributions to the ISPE GAMP Good Practice Guide: A Risk-Based Approach to Calibration Management, NCSLI RP-15: Inter-laboratory Comparisons, and NASA Reference Publication RP 1342 Metrology, Calibration and Measurement Process Guidelines, Miguel attributes much of his professional success to the teaching and mentoring that he received from senior colleagues while serving as a Program Manager for the NASA headquarters–sponsored Metrology and Calibration Working Group and as the NCSLI Region 8 Los Angeles Section Coordinator during his formative years.

Presently, Miguel is the committee treasurer and Board Chairman of Measurement Science Conference. Additionally, Miguel served as a Board Director for the Los Angeles Chapter of the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers.

On a personal note, Miguel, a native of Madrid, Spain, lives in Thousand Oaks, California with his wife and family. Apart from enjoying epic family road trips, his pastimes include fishing and golfing (badly), rooting for his favorite hockey team (GO KINGS GO!), and sorting through the massive Bronze Age comic book collection he’s managed to assemble. He holds an undergraduate degree in Physics from Occidental College and a Master of Science degree from CSU Dominguez Hills in Quality Assurance.