Molecular Archives

Speakers

Philip Bentley, PhD

Novartis Pharmaceuticals
email

Philip Bentley received his doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. He went on to pursue postdoctoral work on the mechanisms of mutagenicity and metabolic activation at the Universities of Basel and Mainz. Bentley joined the experimental toxicology group at CIBA-Geigy and went on to become head of this group, as well as the head of the drug metabolism and preclinical safety groups. With the formation of Novartis, Bentley assumed leadership of the drug metabolism pharmacokinetics group in Europe. In 1997, he moved to the United States to head the U.S. Novartis toxicology group. Since 2005, Bentley has been the global head of safety profiling and assessment at Novartis.

R. Daniel Benz, PhD

U.S. Food and Drug Administration
email | web site | publications

Daniel Benz received his undergraduate degree in biology at the Illinois Institute of Technology and his PhD in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. Benz went on to do postdoctoral work in genetic toxicology at York University in Toronto. Benz has held academic positions at the University of California, Irvine, and at Southampton College, has worked for the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and has served as consultant for the New York Health Department and the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1987 as a review toxicologist, and has since served as a team leader at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). More recently, he has been database manager for the informatics and computational safety assessment staff at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). Benz has published numerous papers in the field of computational toxicology.

Nigel Greene, PhD

Pfizer Inc.
email | publications

Nigel Greene earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry and computational science from the University of Leeds, from which he was later awarded a doctorate in chemistry. He went on to work at Lhasa, Ltd., where he promoted the development and use of the DEREK software package. He went on to work at Tripos, where he was involved in designing the Sybil molecular modeling software suite. In 2001, Greene joined Pfizer's worldwide safety sciences department, where he now heads the global toxico-informatics center of emphasis, which is responsible for developing in silico systems for toxicology, including structure-based approaches, bioinformatics, and systems-biology applications.

Christoph Helma, PhD

University of Freiburg
email | web site | publications

Christoph Helma obtained his undergraduate degree and PhD in chemistry and physics from the Technical University of Vienna. He followed this with postdoctoral work in toxicology at the University of Vienna. From 1995 to 2005, he was director of the Machine Learning Laboratory at the Institute of Computer Sciences at the University of Freiburg, and in 2004 founded his own company, In Silico Toxicology. He is the editor of a textbook, Predictive Toxicology, and author of numerous articles on data mining for predictive toxicology.

May Lee, PhD

Iconix Pharmaceuticals
email

May Lee received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois. She did postdoctoral work at Harvard University before joining a microbial fermentation-based natural products discovery program at Lederle Laboratories. Lee joined Microcide Pharmaceuticals in 1994, where she developed and managed the company's molecular diversity program and the high-throughput screening group. In 2001, she moved to Iconix Pharmaceuticals as the director of drug informatics, and has been instrumental in the development of the company's DrugMatrix software.

Sean Ekins, PhD, DSc

ACT, LLC
email | publications

Sean Ekins did his graduate training at the University of Aberdeen, where he received a master's degree and PhD in clinical pharmacology and a DSc in Science. He completed postdoctoral studies in the department of drug disposition at Eli Lilly Research Laboratories. Ekins has subsequently held positions in leading pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Concurrent Pharmaceuticals, where he served as the associate director for computational drug discovery. More recently, he served as vice president of computational biology at GeneGo, where he developed software for drug metabolism and toxicity assessment. Ekins has published more than 80 articles and book chapters on in vitro and computational approaches to ADME/Tox, and has recently edited a book on computational applications to pharmaceutical research and development. He is currently editing a second book, Computational Toxicology: Risk Assessment for Pharmaceutical and Environmental Chemicals. He serves as Vice President of Computational Biology at ACT, LLC and holds an appointment as adjunct associate professor in the school of pharmacy at the University of Maryland.

Kiryn Haslinger

Kiryn Haslinger is a science writer and editor with a masters in theoretical chemistry. Since working with James D. Watson on his book DNA: The Secret of Life as a research and editorial assistant, she has written freelance articles on science and scientific history.