The machine took six minutes to send one page. In 1984, this counted as connection. Laura Schoen had just arrived in New York with a master's degree in international relations, a Brazilian upbringing and no American professional network. Résumés went through the mail. Replies were scarce. One came from Burson-Marsteller, an agency she had never heard of, and began an interview process that lasted half a year.
There were meetings with senior executives, some conducted in other languages to test her fluency. Then came a peculiar final exercise: photographs of famous places, presented for identification. The first was Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Schoen knew it because her father's family lived in the city and she had visited often. A test of geography had accidentally become a test of biography.
She got the job. The new recruit had to learn the dialect of a global agency: “seamless,” “connected 24/7,” and other phrases that sounded more ambitious when offices depended on telex machines. Yet beneath the vocabulary sat an idea that would organize the rest of her career. International work succeeds when people are interested in one another. Technology can shorten the delay. It cannot supply the interest.
Two briefs, one passport
Schoen grew up in Rio de Janeiro and spent extended stretches in Argentina and Mexico. She speaks English and Portuguese with native or bilingual fluency, Spanish professionally, and some Italian and French. At the University of Pennsylvania, she studied international relations. That education gave her a way to describe the borders she had already learned to cross.
By the time she joined Weber Shandwick in late 2000, she had built a career in large communications groups and worked with subjects as varied as investment banking, pharmaceuticals and tourism. The firm put her in charge of global healthcare. Nine years later, it added Latin America to her brief.
These might look like two different jobs. In practice, they demand the same rare trick: making complicated information travel without stripping away context. Healthcare adds scientific evidence, regulation and personal stakes. Latin America adds languages, local politics and markets too readily compressed into one label. Schoen's advantage was not simply knowing both territories. It was understanding why neither could be managed as a tidy abstraction.
“I cannot impose my view on others and I need to try to see things through their eyes.”Laura Schoen, on what travel taught her
Under her leadership, Weber Shandwick's global healthcare practice grew to four times its former size. Her remit covered pharmaceutical campaigns, crisis preparation, corporate positioning and issues management. The work also extended to nonprofit organizations. In 2022, she led the multi-agency DXTRA Health team appointed to support Moderna's global corporate communications, pulling specialists from several Interpublic companies into one assignment.
The Latin American build was just as concrete. Appointed regional chair in 2009, Schoen led Weber Shandwick's introduction of directly owned operations in 2011. The network expanded to five offices across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, with digital and creative capabilities built for regional needs. In 2019, the operation posted double-digit growth. A year later, industry judges named it Latin American Agency of the Year.
A walk through a city of poems
The most cinematic episode in Schoen's public recollections predates the executive titles. Early in her career, she served as publicist for a German film production in Ouro Preto, the colonial Brazilian city of steep cobblestones, baroque churches and fountains. The production's leading actress was the daughter of Cecília Meireles, the Brazilian poet who had written about the place.
Schoen and the actress walked the city together. At each location, her companion recited her mother's poems. It is a scene about work that temporarily forgets to look like work: two women, a film assignment and a place narrated by someone who had inherited its language. Schoen calls it unforgettable.
It also offers a miniature of her professional method. A location is never merely scenery. A market is never merely a pin on a map. Someone already knows the story, and the first responsibility is to listen long enough to hear it.
The discipline of being a beginner
Executive biographies tend to arrange a person as a completed object. Schoen's own list of off-hours interests spoils that picture. She takes piano lessons. She trains with a ping pong coach. She works on her swimming with a trainer. Each activity comes with immediate, unsentimental feedback: a missed note, a late return, a stroke that wastes motion.
She describes the common thread as continuous improvement and acquiring new skills. The phrase might sound like office wallpaper if she did not keep choosing hobbies that make progress so audible and visible. Remaining teachable is more convincing when a teacher is actually present.
Family, art and travel complete the picture she has offered of life beyond work. Sharing her family's happiness and suffering, she says, taught her about resilience and made her more hopeful. Books, films, exhibitions, plays and concerts feed ideas she can bring to a client's problem, along with respect for the creative process. Travel supplies perspective and interrupts the temptation to treat one's own view as universal.
That instinct also appears in the institutions she has chosen to support. Schoen has served on the executive committee of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication, now known as 4As Health, which advocates for the exchange of credible scientific information. She previously sat on the advisory board of CancerCare, a nonprofit providing counseling, education and practical assistance. Both roles sit near the central tension of her field: people need information they can trust, but trust is never produced by information alone. It is earned through clarity, conduct and attention to the person receiving it.
Even her restaurant answer is local and walkable. Living in Chelsea, she named nearby places she could reach on foot, plus a favorite in Brooklyn. The executive whose work crosses continents still appreciates the radius of a neighborhood dinner.
“Choose to do something you love with purpose and strive to make a difference.”Laura Schoen
Recognition, then a wider remit
The awards arrived in a steady sequence. Schoen served on the inaugural Cannes Lions Health jury in 2014. MM+M inducted her into its Hall of Femme in 2017. PRWeek named her its first Best PR Professional in Latin America in 2019 and inducted her into its Hall of Femme in 2020. In 2022, she received the inaugural Outstanding Agency Professional honor at the publication's U.S. Healthcare + Pharma Communications Awards.
The titles kept widening too. In 2020, she became chief healthcare officer of Constituency Management Group, later organized as DXTRA Health. In January 2024, The Weber Shandwick Collective named her its chief healthcare officer, responsible for health work across agencies that include Weber Shandwick, Current Global, dna Communications and Powell Tate. She retained her DXTRA Health responsibilities and the Latin America chair.
First U.S. agency role at Burson-Marsteller.
Joined Weber Shandwick to lead global healthcare.
Added Chair of Latin America to her remit.
Entered PRWeek's Hall of Femme and took a group-wide healthcare role.
Named Chief Healthcare Officer of The Weber Shandwick Collective.
Awards can freeze a career into polished nouns. Schoen's verbs are more revealing: build, learn, listen, travel, advise. Colleagues have praised her curiosity, tenacity and ability to distill complex issues into creative campaigns. Her own public language is quieter. She writes about gratitude, purpose and being challenged to do better.
Her 2024 promotion made that habit of translation more important. A collective is useful only when its specialist parts can work together without losing what makes them specialist. Schoen's task spans agencies, regions and disciplines, with healthcare as the connecting problem. It resembles the “seamless” ambition she encountered on her first agency job, except the modern version must be seamless to the client while remaining richly specific inside.
The old lesson in the new machine
Healthcare communications now moves at a speed that would make the telex machine seem theatrical. Scientific claims meet social platforms in seconds. A local misunderstanding can become a global reputation problem before a meeting has been scheduled to discuss it. The networks under Schoen's supervision contain more tools, specialties and data than the agency of her first week could have imagined.
Yet the oldest lesson in her career has survived every upgrade. Schoen once wrote that a truly global organization begins with sincere interest and respect for differences. She learned that from watching Harold Burson speak with visitors, travel to distant offices and listen patiently to people whose English was limited. Global scale, in that telling, is not a triumph of distribution. It is a discipline of attention.
That is why the landmarks test feels like more than an eccentric hiring story. Schoen recognized Milan because the city was part of her family. She understood Rio because it was home. She learned New York as an immigrant graduate mailing résumés without connections. Her career turned those particular places into working knowledge, then used the knowledge to connect people who did not begin with the same map.
The page that once needed six minutes now arrives instantly. The hard part remains exactly where it was.