Lisa Rayder, pharmaceutical market researcher and avid travel and quilter, has died at 65

Lisa Rayder, 65, of Newtown, a longtime pharmaceutical market researcher and dedicated traveler and quilter, died Friday, July 15, after a short battle with hepatic cancer at Chandler Hall Health Services Hospice.

A native of Bristol, Conn., Ms. Rayder came to the Philadelphia area in 1986 to work in strategic market research at the Squibb corporation, later known as Bristol Myers Squibb. After moving to the area, she earned a master’s of business administration from the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania in 1988, and previously earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Smith College in Northampton, Mass., in 1979 and a doctorate in botany from the University of California Riverside in 1982.

During her postdoctoral fellowship, Ms. Rayder worked at the Harvard Biological Laboratories in the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology, where she would ultimately meet her husband, Steve Mosley, in 1985. Mosley was also a postdoctoral fellow.

“We were in different labs, and met in the tissue culture lab,” he said. “And we went on from there.”

The couple were married in October of 1986 in Yardley, by the mayor of the town at the time. Before their ceremony, the couple was asked if they wanted a 10-minute ceremony or a 15-minute ceremony. They went with the 10 for efficiency’s sake, Mosley said.

Ms. Rayder and Mosley both came to work at Squibb — with Ms. Rayder interviewing doctors and patients about the medications they were prescribing and taking. Her work, as well as Mosley’s, involved significant international travel, with the couple putting in upward of 50,000 miles some years. But, Mosley said, the pair always managed to make time for their son, Maxwell Mosley, regardless of where they had to be.

“There were times the limo would come to get us to go to the airport, and we’d say to the driver, ‘Can you drop our son off at day care?’ ” Mosley said. “We always felt very spoiled.”

Ms. Rayder stayed at Squibb for eight years before moving onto similar positions at a number of pharmaceutical companies. She ultimately settled at the Blue Bell-based health-care marketing research services firm GfK V2, where she was a partner and executive vice president. She retired in 2014.

Despite traveling so frequently for work, Ms. Rayder still loved to travel for pleasure, and often took Caribbean cruises and European river cruises with her husband and son. Some of her best-loved Caribbean locations included Saint Croix, Saint Lucia, and Saint Martin, but the smaller, 130-person river cruises on the Danube in Europe that traveled through seven countries were her favorites.

While Ms. Rayder’s career was spent in the pharmaceutical industry, she also had a strong passion for arts and crafts. An avid quilter and needleworker, her home was filled with her artistic endeavors — as many as 75 framed needlepoint designs, and some 1,300 pounds of quilting fabric, the latter of which Mosley donated to a quilting organization following her death.

Her love of the arts lead Ms. Rayder to also serve as a board member of Art Goes to School, a nonprofit group that brings art education to elementary school students throughout the Delaware Valley. Mosley has donated a number of her quilts to that organization for an upcoming auction.

In addition to her work in science and art, Ms. Rayder was also civically engaged, having served as the president of the homeowners association at the Villas of Newtown, the 55-and-over community where she and her husband moved in 2014. In that position, she helped shepherd the Villas of Newtown through the tumultuous early days of the coronavirus pandemic, which caused many of its amenities to close.

Most of the community, Mosley said, was understanding of the closings, but 10% — the “crankies,” as he called them — wanted everything to remain open. Ms. Rayder, he said, handled the situation with aplomb.

Despite her educational and professional pedigree, Ms. Rayder remained humble, and never bragged about her credentials, Mosley said. She was quiet about them to the degree that, in fact, many of her neighbors never knew of her accomplishments until after her death, and learned of them in an obituary. The response was so great, Mosley had to start a spreadsheet of all the people who reached out in order to keep track of who it was he had left to thank.

“She was so smart. She had a Ph.D., a Penn MBA, a Harvard postdoc,” Mosley said. “She was a very, very smart lady.”

In addition to her husband and son, Ms. Rayder is survived by brothers Michael, Shawn, and Scott Rayder.

A funeral was held July 30 at the Joseph A. Fluehr III Funeral Home in Richboro.

Donations in Ms. Rayder’s memory can be made to National Public Radio, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Planned Parenthood, and the American Red Cross.