Confirmed Speakers

Michael is a computational chemist who received his PhD designing inhibitors for a novel Huntington's disease target from RWTH Aachen. Before joining Evotec as HTS support lead, he gained wet lab experience by working for Sandoz and quantum chemistry methods at Boehringer Ingelheim. In addition, he works on creating safer drugs as a principal computational scientist for the Cornell Tech startup Providentia Technologies.

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Daniel Rauh studied pharmacy in Greifswald and obtained his PhD in 2003 with Gerhard Klebe in Marburg. His postdoctoral work with Milton Stubbs in Halle and Kevan Shokat in San Francisco led to a position at the CGC of the Max Planck Society in Dortmund. Since 2013, he's been Professor and Chair of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry at TU Dortmund University, focusing on genetically defined cancers using protein X-ray crystallography, structure-based design, and organic synthesis. His work is aimed at understanding cancer resistance and developing inhibitors. Daniel founded the Centre for Integrated Drug Research (ZIW) and the Drug Discovery Hub Dortmund (DDHD), translating research into pharmaceutical applications. As a serial entrepreneur, he founded startups in the field of targeted cancer therapies, combining scientific knowledge with practical solutions in cancer treatment.

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Gebhard Thoma is an associate director at Novartis Biomedical Research in Basel. He studied chemistry at the universities of Darmstadt (Germany) and Basel and received his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Bernd Giese. Following his doctoral studies, he spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States, working with Prof. Dennis P. Curran. In 1993, Gebhard joined the central Research Laboratories of Ciba-Geigy. After the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz in 1996, which led to the creation of Novartis, he transitioned to the pharmaceutical research division of the new company. In 1999, he was awarded a one-year research sabbatical stay at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. Gebhard's specialization lies in medicinal chemistry, and he has been involved in diverse projects targeting various drug targets. Some of these include GPCRs, kinases, proteases, and ion channels.

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