Webinar
How to be a great drug discovery chemist
Recording: 20 June 2023
Do you know what it takes to become a truly great drug discovery chemist?
Watch our panel of experts as they discuss tactics to achieve success in your medicinal chemistry projects, experiences they’ve had and advice they would give. Learn about the key challenges today’s drug hunter needs to overcome, the skills it takes to gain success across pharma and biotech, and what the future may hold for this industry.
This webinar is aimed at senior scientists looking to take their discovery projects to the next level, but will be useful for everyone, including those starting out in the field. It will be an interactive, audience-led panel discussion, so feel free to come with ideas to shape the discussion.
Meet the panel
Ashley Fenwick
Consultant, Horizon Therapeutics
Ashley has an extensive history as a drug hunter, starting as a scientist at GSK before joining Pfizer for 13 years, working as an Associate Director to lead many of their discovery projects. He moved to Zoetis in 2013 as Research Director, before most recently joining Horizon Therapeutics as a Consultant. He has a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from Imperial College London.
Sonia M. Gutiérrez
Director – Discovery Research & Technology, Eli Lilly
Sonia is a Director of Discovery Research and Technology at Eli Lilly. She gained her PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Salamanca with research placements at Cambridge University with Prof. Goodman, UCLA with Prof. Houk and Merck, Sharp and Dohme. She has 23 years of experience at Eli Lilly across several medicinal and computational chemistry roles, leading their computational strategy in around 45 medicinal chemistry projects.
Dennis Koester
Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry, Fibrogen
Dennis currently works in oncology and immuno-oncology drug discovery, with medicinal chemistry experience spanning property-driven as well as target-based drug discovery programs. Before joining FibroGen in 2022, he was a drug hunter at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, on programs in infectious and tropical diseases. He obtained his PhD in Organic Chemistry at the University of Göttingen, and worked at the University of Kyoto in 2011 and at the University of Münster in 2013. Before starting his career in Global Drug Discovery at Novartis in 2015, he conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford.
Chase Smith
Product Manager, Optibrium
Chase is a synthetic organic and medicinal chemist by training with over ten years of experience in the biotech industry and over ten years of academic experience teaching in schools of pharmacy. Since joining Optibrium, Chase has filled multiple roles supporting customers as part of the Application Science group and contributed to software development as a member of the Product Management team.