Director of Medicinal Chemistry

Throughout my career in medicinal chemistry, I have had the privilege of working on cutting-edge drug discovery projects that have led to the development of multiple small-molecule inhibitors. This includes leading teams that have discovered four small- molecule kinase inhibitors, which were selected as development candidates in the areas of oncology and inflammation. Since joining the Prebys Center as the Director of Medicinal Chemistry in 2023, I have had many numerous opportunities to lead medicinal chemistry research efforts across multiple classes of targets (e.g., kinases, GPCRs, dehydrogenases, etc.), utilizing a variety of chemical approaches, including traditional small-molecule inhibitors, PROTACs and molecular glues. Prior to my work at the Prebys Center, I served as the Head of Early R&D at January Therapeutics conducting research into drug delivery of albumin encapsulated drug nanoparticles (2022-2023), as Principal Investigator at Deciphera Pharmaceuticals where I led a chemistry team that identified inhibitors for both the GCN2 and PERK integrated stress response kinases (2020-2022), and as a medicinal chemist and senior director at Exelixis where my groups teams identified inhibitors for the JAK2, CDC7, and PI3Kd kinases (1998-2011). I was also the founder of HD Sciences, a startup company formerly located in Kansas City, which was working on a technology for the sub-micromolar high throughput synthesis and purification of chemical compounds using nanoparticle immobilized bioorthogonal chemistries.