24th EuroQSAR

Dr. De Vivo is head of the Molecular Modeling and Drug Discovery laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is also Associate Director of the IIT, responsible for Computational Sciences. He is Director of the Italian CECAMIT-SIMUL node of the CECAM (https://www.cecam.org) organization, which promotes advanced computational methods for important problems in frontier areas of science and technology. The lab develops and applies computational methods to achieve an atomic-level comprehension of chemical systems. This information is used to design potent inhibitors and nanoparticles with programmed properties as a promising starting point for drug discovery programs. His research activity is partially supported by the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC). In 2017, he received the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS), Computers in Chemistry Division. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of scientific journals like JCIM (ACS Publications) and Chem (Cell Press). In 2021 he co-founded IAMA Therapeutics, which develops new drugs for brain disorders. In 2023, he receved the ESMEC International Alumni Award from the European School of Medicinal Chemistry. He is the Executive Editor of the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (ACS publication), which is the reference journal for the broad community of computational chemists.

Professor Ola Engkvist is head of Molecular AI in Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca R&D. He did his PhD in computational chemistry at Lund University followed by a postdoc at Cambridge University. After working for two biotech companies he joined AstraZeneca in 2004. He currently lead the Molecular AI department, where the focus is to develop novel methods for ML/AI in drug design , productionalize the methods and apply the methods to AstraZeneca’s small molecules drug discovery portfolio. His main research interests are deep learning based molecular de novo design, synthetic route prediction and large scale molecular property predictions. He has published over 145 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He is adjunct professor in machine learning and AI for drug design at Chalmers University of Technology and a trustee of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center.

Tanja Kortemme, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. Her group develops foundational computational approaches to design proteins de novo, and applies these methods to engineer new functions across biological scales, ranging from atomic details of macromolecular interactions to cellular processes. Dr. Kortemme received her PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) in Biochemistry and Biophysics from EMBL Heidelberg and the University of Hannover, Germany, and conducted research as an EMBO and Human Frontier Science Program Fellow at the University of Washington Seattle. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Foundation award in Molecular Biology, and an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Jean-Louis Reymond is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He studied Chemistry and Biochemistry at the ETH Zürich and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Lausanne on natural products synthesis (1989). After a Post-Doc and Assistant Professorship at the Scripps Research Institute, he joined the University of Bern (1997). His current research focuses on chemical space exploration methods combining data science, artificial intelligence, organic synthesis and bioassays to discover new bioactive small molecules and peptides (https://gdb.unibe.ch).