‘I take Uniontown with me everywhere I go’
Dressed in a business suit and with a briefcase in hand, Dana G. Vaughns arrives at the airport every Monday morning.
The former Uniontown resident, who now lives in the state of California, will walk over to the coffee stand at the airport to get his cup of coffee before he boards a plane that will fly him out to Las Vegas, Nev., Salt Lake City, Utah, or Denver, Colo. Depending on his work week, he could be in one city for up to four days or split his time between all of those cities by Thursday.
“You know you fly a lot when the agents know you by your first name, or the ladies at the coffee stand wait for you to come in and speak Spanish to them,” Vaughns said with a laugh. “I take planes like they’re cabs.”
As a senior endocrinologist business manager with Novo Nordisk A/S, he quickly moved up the ranks from being a pharmaceutical sales representative. In his new role, he is responsible for sales growth and management of 10 territory Endocrinology specialty representatives across Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Idaho.
By Friday morning, Vaughns is back in his office, wrapping up his work week with teleconferences, phone calls, emails and other administrative tasks.
A demanding schedule like his may seem overwhelming, but Vaughns said he has never been one to really contemplate much of anything. And while he remains quiet on the issue because it relates to his health, Vaughns said he is also a bone cancer survivor.
Diagnosed in 2009 with plasmacytoma, which is a solitary bone mass in the T1 vertebrae, Vaughns had to wear a full head, neck and torso stabilizer to prevent further damage. Later that year, he underwent surgery to replace the vertebrae with a new one and then received high doses of radiation for five weeks to ensure the cancer had not spread.
Vaughns said he couldn’t understand why this happened to him and questioned God.
“I heard him say, ‘I’m giving this to you because I was going to give it to someone else, but they would not have survived,'” Vaughns said. “‘If you do that for me, I’ll bless you for an eternity.'”
Since then, Vaughns said he has been blessed and has gone back to his fast-paced routine. Life has just been about taking action, he said.
“I am just a doer,” he said. “I just get up and go.”
Crediting his parents for his motivation to excel by instilling a strong work ethic in him, Vaughns said he learned from an early age the importance of education. He grew up in the East End of Uniontown, which he said was seeing tough times and is still today.
But it was where his friends were, where the basketball courts were that he found a passion and talent combined into one. It was that same passion that sent him to college on a scholarship, first at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, W.Va., and later at Lock Haven University in Clearfield, where he graduated with a degree in fine arts.
His background ultimately shaped who he is today, he said.
“I loved it (East End) because that’s what I knew,” he said. “There are things that I learned in the East End that I will take with me for the rest of my life and apply it to what it is I do on a daily basis. There is no changing that.”
From the basketball court at Lock Haven University, Vaughns traveled to Denmark to play on a league known as Basketballklubben Esbjerg following graduation. During his time there, his father passed away, and shortly after that, he was back in Uniontown as a program director at the YMCA. A director of the youth soccer and basketball programs, he was responsible for coordinating the schedule, the volunteers and assisting the kids. Additionally, he assisted with a senior citizen golf class.
Returning to Uniontown and working in that capacity was enjoyable for him, he said, and it was a great way to start his career.
“I never had a bad day there, and it was probably because of the interaction with the kids who would come by the office with the big smiles on and just ask if they could come in and shoot baskets, whatever it might be,” he said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Then his friend Marc Vassar introduced him to an opportunity in the pharmaceutical sales industry. Everyone looked up to Vassar during his era, he said, and the opportunity was enticing to him.
“Back in the day, everybody said they wanted to be like Michael Jordan,” Vaughns said. “Well, we all said we wanted to be like Marc because that was our Michael Jordan of my era to emulate what it is that good looked like, so to speak. I always valued what Marc had shared.”
In 1999, he entered the industry as a pharmaceutical sales representative with AstraZeneca, where he promoted and launched products in the respiratory and cardiovascular arena. Two years later, he accepted a position with Novo Nordisk A/S as a professional sales representative and later transitioned into a district business manager role in 2004 with the same company.
Since that point, Vaughns has served as a district business manager, an institutional district business manager, an endocrinology district business manager, a senior endocrinology district business manager, an associate director of field force execution and now as a senior endocrinology district business manager.
“My geography consists of providers and caregivers from Canada to Mexico on the West Coast,” he said. “Maybe there was something (Marc) saw initially, but it struck a fire in me, and I just kept on until I got what I wanted and got what I needed for my family.”
His work ethic was shaped by his parents, Vaughns said, as his mother still stays active and busy at 83 years of age. But even with his tremendous list of accomplishments in his career, he said he can’t help but feel as if something is missing.
“I do wish I had more time with my dad,” he said. “I was 24 when my dad passed away. I still think about him every day, what he did on a daily basis and what he did that meant various things to people and how they viewed him in the community.”
Between his father’s work as a dentist, his efforts in the community, and his duties as a father, Vaughns said he feels fortunate he was exposed to that lifestyle his father possessed.
“I’m just glad I had great parental guidance,” Vaughns said.
“I really think that is something that is so key that helps keep people on track.”
And while he continues his routine, flying from one airport to the next for his work, he said things couldn’t have worked out better.
“It’s like the old TV show ‘Cheers,'” Vaughns said. “It’s like being Norm in all these different places. They walk in. They know who you are. It’s a lot of fun.”
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