John P Santoro

John Santoro is an independent communications counselor with more than 50 years of experience in organizational communications. He has been an Adjunct Instructor at NYU since 2013 and received a Teaching Excellence Award in 2024.

He is best known for his work with Pfizer, the global biopharmaceutical company, where he served for more than a decade as Vice President, Stakeholder Communications. His responsibilities included speechwriting for members of the company’s executive leadership team and directing key elements of the company’s communications outreach, including its annual report to shareholders. At Pfizer, he helped form two employee affinity groups, the Global Women’s Council and the Global Asian Alliance. He retired from Pfizer in 2018.

He launched his communications career in 1975 at the seminal HR consulting firm Brecker and Merryman, starting as a Copywriter and rising to Creative Director. His major clients included Ford Motor Company, Merck, Honeywell, the New York City Police Department, and Pertamina, Indonesia’s state-owned energy company.

In 1990, he joined Warner-Lambert Company as Director of HR Communications and then moved into Public Affairs as Director of Management Communications. Following Pfizer’s acquisition of Warner-Lambert in 2000, he was named Pfizer’s Executive Director of Leadership Communications and later promoted to Vice
President, Stakeholder Communications.

Today, in his independent practice, he works with health science companies and their PR firms as a communications counselor and content creator. He is typically embedded within teams of internal and external professionals who develop and execute high-leverage communications initiatives. 

His pro bono clients include the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation and The Dialogue Project, a national initiative to improve social discourse. He is the immediate past-president of The Compassionate Friends Foundation, the endowment fund for the nation’s largest volunteer organization supporting families after the death of a child. 

John graduated from Dickinson College in 1975 with a BA in political science and earned an MA in public and corporate communication from Seton Hall University in 1998. He taught in the graduate communications program at Seton Hall before joining NYU.