Medical research and drug discovery have been my passion since I was a teenager, after my father became seriously ill. Nearly three decades later, after academia and translational, technology-enabled roles in pharmaceutical R&D, I've had the privilege of working with brilliant scientists, teams and partners to accelerate discovery and develop agency-approved medicines that help patients.

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I earned my Ph.D. in endocrine physiology from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Imperial College London, completed postdoctoral training at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, then joined Ferring Pharmaceuticals in R&D across the UK and US. I then joined Merck Research Labs in 2005 — first in clinical pharmacology dosing patients for the very first time with new potential medicines, then leading discovery labs and business development teams.

 

In 2015, I led a deep dive into the lab of the future for Merck — evaluating scores of technology-enabled startups trying to reinvent how drugs are discovered and developed. One of them was a small computational chemistry company. After a BD meeting, the CEO and I kept talking about how you bend the adoption curve for a new technology. It would come from putting drug hunters and platform developers to work side by side. We envisioned a new role and that's how I ended up migrating from a 100,000 strong Pharma company to join a team of ~200 software developers and comp chemists. 

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That company was Schrödinger. I now lead its therapeutics division, scaling the cross-functional team to ~150 bilingual scientists spanning computational chemistry, biology, translational, preclinical, development and data & decision sciences.  I also lead the licensing, partnerships and company-creation work that connects our science, assets and platform to a biopharma ecosystem that is rapidly adopting new technology and navigating the impact. 

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My career arc is a reflection of my belief that optimized medicine invention occurs at the interface between disciplines and people with different skills, tools and technology when they are given the opportunity and a mission to work as one team inside or across companies. Building and holding those teams together for the journey, so the value reaches patients rather than stalling at a handoffs, is the part of my job I find most rewarding.

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I like to stay close enough to the science to be able to discern when a finding or claim is valid, and close enough to the technology to know what it's actually capable of. Technology doesn't remove judgment from medicine development. It changes where judgment is needed most.

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A list of my scientific publications can be found on Google Scholar

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In my spare time, I enjoy writing, travel, photography, finding new ways to teach science and technology, and mentoring people of all ages including pop-up camps and the Therapeutic Momentum® podcast.