Evelyn Buchner Santos - Philips

What path has your career taken since graduation? 

After graduating from my Bachelor at Edinburgh, I continued my academic track by completing a MSc Biomedical engineering at the University of Oxford. From there, I joined Philips in the Netherlands.

I started at the Innovation site, as a Functional development engineer. I was curious about elements beyond the product itself, and wanted to have a broader scope of the project (incl. operations, regulatory, quality, business, etc.) therefore I changed roles, and started working as a Project Manager.

After a about 4 years, having launched new products, incl. patents I decided to open my wings further and moved from technology, innovation and research into the business, working as a Product manager, consumer products. After about 2 years, working as part of a small/ venture like business, I moved into the Health care side of Philips. I worked as a  Product manager for services, focusing on e-commerce. The role then expanded into a Senior product manager, for overall digitization of services.

What is your current role?

As a senior product manager, I am responsible for defining the strategy, portfolio, go-market, innovation / R&D roadmap and team capabilities to build new products/ services, for both hardware as well as software products. My experience so far, focused in the med tech domain.

What experiences do you feel helped you get to your current position? 

During my time at Edinburgh, these are some of the key things that helped me at the start my my career:

• experience with societies during my studies (Engineers without boarders, Biomed engineering President at Oxford, Engineering representative at Edinburgh)
• having a differentiation while being a student (International Student of the Year award)
• degrees BEng, MSc and MBA

Since then, over time, building experience with working with people, together in an international context while continuously building and evolving soft skills and knowledge.

How have you used the skills and/or knowledge developed during your degree in your career? 

• it created the fundamental way of learning & thinking
• created a basis for local, structured thinking
• "dare to do it mindset"

What advice would you give to students who are interested in your area of work?

• Take the extra mile, its important,
• find & explore new things
• most importantly - have fun!

This profile was published in November 2025