Confirmed Speakers

Rutger Folmer is Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Symeres (previously Mercachem) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Rutger is responsible for a handful of teams, each running one or more medicinal chemistry projects in the hit to lead and lead opt stages. Before joining Mercachem, Rutger worked for about 20 years at AstraZeneca in Sweden, where he was responsible for various constellations of structural biology groups, with focus on biophysical techniques and fragment-based lead generation. During later years, he also held a portfolio management role in the Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity disease area.

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Nik is a trained pharmacist who followed his passion for data and early drug discovery already during his studies. After graduation he moved on to GlaxoWellcome to dig deeper into computational chemistry and followed this up with a PhD (University of Wuerzburg) and later a postdoc (EliLilly) in cheminformatics and chemometrics. Nik joined NIBR in 2005 as part of GDC's CADD group where he worked in multiple small-molecule drug discovery projects, developed new scientific algorithms as well as software for the community. Some exciting data science projects Nik worked on over the years: • FOCUS - a global communication and modeling platform for applied and computational medicinal chemists • Cheminformatics approaches for DNA-encoded libraries • iGPS - integrated GDC, PKS and Safety dashboard for Discovery • Algorithmic explorations of chemical reactions • Generative chemistry to enable drug discovery project teams

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Pat Walters heads the Computation & Informatics group at Relay Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. His group focuses on novel applications of computational methods that integrate computer simulations and experimental data to provide insights that drive drug discovery programs. Before joining Relay, Pat spent more than 20 years at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he was Global Head of Modeling & Informatics. He is a member of the editorial board for Artificial Intelligence in the Life Sciences and is on the editorial advisory boards of The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and The Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Pat received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Arizona, where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in conformational analysis. Before obtaining his Ph.D., he worked at Varian Instruments as both a chemist and a software developer. Pat received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Dr. Cournia is a Senior Researcher at the Biomedical Research Foundation, Academy of Athens, where she works on anticancer drug and materials design using High Performance Computing (http://www.drugdesign.gr). She graduated from the Chemistry Department, University of Athens in 2001 and received her PhD at the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 2006. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Chemistry Department, Yale University, USA, on computer-aided drug design and in 2009 she became a Lecturer at Yale College. She is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Chemical information and Modeling, American Chemical Society and the national representative of Greece in the Division of Computational and Theoretical Chemistry in the European Chemical Society. She is currently teaching at the Master’s program “Data Science and Information Technologies” at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National University of Athens. She is the Founder of the SME Ingredio, a mobile phone app that informs consumers on the potential hazards of chemical ingredients in food and cosmetics products using open, peer-reviewed data (http://www.ingred.io/android). She is currently a member of the Computational Chemistry Initiative of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry.

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Rutger Folmer is Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Symeres (previously Mercachem) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Rutger is responsible for a handful of teams, each running one or more medicinal chemistry projects in the hit to lead and lead opt stages. Before joining Mercachem, Rutger worked for about 20 years at AstraZeneca in Sweden, where he was responsible for various constellations of structural biology groups, with focus on biophysical techniques and fragment-based lead generation. During later years, he also held a portfolio management role in the Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity disease area.

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Dr Natalja Kurbatova is a Lead Data Scientist at Zifo RnD Solutions, providing consultancy services and domain expertise in robust inference from disparate data sources through data integration and modelling, feature engineering, machine learning methods and ML operations.

At her previous career stages, Natalja worked at AstraZeneca dealing with Knowledge Graphs and at the European Bioinformatics Institute working with EBI data archives and developing methods for multi-omics data analysis.

Over the last 15 years of active work, Natalja has analysed big data and devised novel techniques for biomarker discovery, delivering and leading scientific software development projects with publications in prestigious journals.

Dr Kurbatova has a PhD in Computer Science; she enjoys motorcycling and Argentinian tango dancing.

Please email natalie.kurbatova@zifornd.com.

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Victor is Senior Computational Drug Designer at Exscientia since 2019, prior to joining Exscientia, Víctor focused his research on applying computational and experimental techniques to advance drug discovery projects in infectious and neurodegenerative diseases. He completed his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Spanish National Research Council receiving the PhD Award by Eli Lilly and the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry. Víctor also developed his research at several institutions including the University of Cambridge.

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Nik is a trained pharmacist who followed his passion for data and early drug discovery already during his studies. After graduation he moved on to GlaxoWellcome to dig deeper into computational chemistry and followed this up with a PhD (University of Wuerzburg) and later a postdoc (EliLilly) in cheminformatics and chemometrics. Nik joined NIBR in 2005 as part of GDC's CADD group where he worked in multiple small-molecule drug discovery projects, developed new scientific algorithms as well as software for the community. Some exciting data science projects Nik worked on over the years: • FOCUS - a global communication and modeling platform for applied and computational medicinal chemists • Cheminformatics approaches for DNA-encoded libraries • iGPS - integrated GDC, PKS and Safety dashboard for Discovery • Algorithmic explorations of chemical reactions • Generative chemistry to enable drug discovery project teams

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Pat Walters heads the Computation & Informatics group at Relay Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. His group focuses on novel applications of computational methods that integrate computer simulations and experimental data to provide insights that drive drug discovery programs. Before joining Relay, Pat spent more than 20 years at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he was Global Head of Modeling & Informatics. He is a member of the editorial board for Artificial Intelligence in the Life Sciences and is on the editorial advisory boards of The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and The Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Pat received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Arizona, where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in conformational analysis. Before obtaining his Ph.D., he worked at Varian Instruments as both a chemist and a software developer. Pat received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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