LEXINGTON, Ky. – When the National Institutes of Health announced $11 million in funding for the University of Kentucky’s new Diabetes Prevention COBRE in November 2025, the spotlight fell on the scientific vision: building prevention research infrastructure in a state where 38% of adults have prediabetes. Behind that award was an 18-month application process, a nearly 600-page submission, and seven investigators across six colleges, and a central challenge the scientific team could not resolve on their own: they lacked someone who could bring all the pieces together into a coherent, complete, and timely submission.
The person who made it fit together wasn’t a scientist. Anna Ortynska had spent twelve years at 3M – a Fortune 500 company with approximately 95,000 employees and $35 billion in annual revenue, operating in more than 70 countries – rising to Lean Six Sigma Black Belt for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She saw the NIH application as a coordination problem she’d solved many times before.
“The principal investigators knew each other’s work well,” Ms Ortynska recalls. “The challenge was organizational traction. Each college had different processes, timelines, priorities. Getting parallel workstreams to deliver in precise sequence – that’s a coordination infrastructure problem.”
She built dependency tracking across parallel workstreams, cross-component consistency protocols, centralized compliance pipelines. The professors focused on science. Ortynska focused on the coordination logic.
The result: $11 million awarded.
The 3M Foundation
Before Ms Ortynska could transfer knowledge between industries, she had to acquire it. She started as a Brand Manager in Healthcare department in Ukraine. By 2017, she held regional authority as Lean Six Sigma Black Belt – the highest certification rank – for EMEA, leading more than ten transformation projects across sales, marketing, logistics services, and IT. She managed teams ranging from 50 to 300 people across more than twenty countries.
Among her projects was a 2018 pricing coordination challenge in 3M’s dental products division. Twenty-plus countries across EMEA, each setting independent prices. Dentists crossed borders for better deals. Distributors lost sales to arbitrage.
“When I asked why prices differed, everyone pointed to someone else,” Ortynska recalls. “Nobody owned the whole picture.”
She created Salesforce-based variance frameworks showing acceptable price differences based on local conditions – transparent enough that arbitrage became obvious, flexible enough that markets retained necessary autonomy. Customer complaints dropped 15% within six months, 34% within a year. The system became permanent infrastructure.
A parallel marketing transformation: before her frameworks, zero EMEA campaigns had confirmed multi-market ROI tracking. One year later: 60%. Post-campaign evaluation jumped from 20% to 80% of teams.
Startup Crisis
Ukrainian IT product company had never operated remotely. On March 1, 2020, they had 300 employees in offices. By March 15, COVID-19 made remote work mandatory.
Generic work-from-home guidelines failed within days. The company brought Ortynska in.
She recognized the problem immediately. It wasn’t about technology. It was about coordination rhythm. The informal cadences that kept teams synchronized had disappeared overnight.
She organized thirty groups by actual work interdependency. Most consultants would have imposed a single system. “We matched coordination frequency to actual work structure,” Ortynska explains. “Tightly connected teams got daily standups. Loosely connected – weekly.”
She ran daily manager coaching during the 2.5-month implementation. Three-month survey results: issues resolved 60% faster. 88% of employees understood their contribution to company goals. The system – which became known as the Daily Pulse System – scaled from 300 to 600 employees and remains in use four years later.
Academia Meets Silicon Valley
After the war began in Ukraine in 2022, Ortynska relocated to the United States and joined the University of Kentucky’s Proposal Development Office.
The COBRE in Diabetes Prevention (P20GM156679) represented everything that makes multi-investigator grants difficult. Public health significance: 96 million Americans living with prediabetes. Mission: build prevention research infrastructure, mentor junior investigators, connect laboratory advances to patient care. Scope: seven principal investigators, six colleges, ~600-page submission, eighteen months.
The problem wasn’t that researchers didn’t understand each other’s science. It was getting six separate college administrative systems to deliver interdependent components on a single timeline.
Ms Ortynska applied her coordination methodology: dependency tracking systems from Salesforce work, cross-component consistency protocols from variance management, compliance integration from Six Sigma. When UK professors struggled to converge on a research center concept, she ran a one-hour Miro session using Lean Canvas – the startup business modeling tool. Three months later: three years of funding secured.
Ms. Ortynska’s impact is reflected in her consistent delivery of competitive submissions that are complete, internally consistent, and submitted on time, even when projects involve multiple colleges and complex scientific teams. Her ability to integrate timelines, scientific content, and compliance requirements ensures that proposals are both competitive and well-structured. Her daily work supports the advancement of the scientific enterprise and strengthens the overall quality of proposal development.
Giving Back
Ms Ortynska teaches what transfers: Crisis Transformation lectures at the European Business Association, Creative Thinking and Process Optimization modules for pre-MBA programs, Remote Work systems workshops for technology companies, research management training for university faculty.
She served on the board of the International Coaching Federation Ohio Valley Chapter – the world’s largest professional organization for coaches.
In 2022–2023, when war displaced Ukrainian professionals, Ortynska designed and led a pro bono coaching initiative as the board member if the ICF Ohio Valley Chapter. The “Coach for Ukraine” project mobilized international coaches to support Ukrainian coaching professionals navigating crisis while experiencing it personally.
The Pattern
Manufacturing, tech startups, academic research – three sectors that rarely borrow from each other. Over seventeen years across corporate, startup, coaching, and academic environments, Ortynska’s work follows one principle: make coordination easier than isolation.
Most organizations insist their problems are unique. They’re usually wrong. Someone else solved this – just in different vocabulary.
Her results: $11 million in research funding. 34% reduction in customer complaints. A remote-work system that scaled from 300 to 600 employees and outlasted the crisis that created it. None of it came easy – each project meant convincing skeptics, navigating institutional inertia, and building trust around new ways of working.
The tools existed. They were just sitting in the wrong industry.
“You need both structure and understanding people,” Ortynska reflects. “Pure efficiency becomes bureaucracy. Pure empathy produces nothing. The hardest thing is to find the balance.”
Anna Ortynska is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and ICF-certified coach serving as Project Manager for Proposal Development at the University of Kentucky. She is the creator of the Daily Pulse System for operational excellence. Her cross-sector methodology – tested in Fortune 500 operations, startup crises, and NIH-funded research – is becoming a playbook for organizations navigating complexity.
