Alex Gaither (Chair)

VP, Head of Disease Biology & Interim Head of Discovery - Exscientia

Alex is Vice President and head of Biology in US for Exscientia. Alex has a long career in drug discovery research work for 18 years at Novartis and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and 2.5 years at the LG Chem Life Sciences Innovation Center in Cambridge. During his tenure at Novartis he supported each step of the pharmaceutical pipeline including early research, target discovery, drug discovery, and early translational work. He has contributed to multiple projects that have entered clinical trials and eventually to commercialization for small molecules, biologics, and siRNA therapeutics. While the Vice president and head of the Translational Medicine department at the LG Chem Life Sciences Innovation Center he managed the internal R&D portfolio of LG Chem Life Sciences in Seoul and supported the strategic advancement of collaboration activities for the Innovation Center in Cambridge to help drive new target and platform technology into clinical development.

Daniel Ebner

Chief Scientific Officer for Xcellomics, Principal Investigator - University of Oxford 

Daniel Ebner is the Chief Scientific Officer for Xcellomics, a Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford and heads the TDI High Throughput Cellular Screening Facility and the Oxford CRISPR/Cas9 Screening Facility at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI), Centre for Medicines Discovery, Nuffield Department of Medicine. Daniel’s main academic research, through a five year £7M CRUK funded grant in collaboration with researchers from the University of Edinburgh and MIT, is focused on identifying and advancing novel combinatorial therapeutics for the treatment of glioblastoma. As head of the cellular screening facility, Daniel has worked with academic and industrial collaborators to complete >150 research projects and has published >70 peer-reviewed papers in the past 5 years in high impact journals such as the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature and Journal of the American Medical Association across a broad range of pathologies including on neurodegeneration, inflammation, autophagy, large-scale iPSC CRISPR/Cas9 screening methods, and novel more physiologically relevant screening models. Previous to his academic career at the University of Oxford, Daniel has worked for >10 years in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry.

Dave Hallet

Chief Executive Officer (Interim) - Exscientia

Dave is an experienced drug hunter with over 20 years’ experience leading successful teams and driving major strategic collaborations. Prior to joining Exscientia he held various positions within Evotec including EVP Chemistry and more recently EVP Alliance Management. Earlier, he spent almost 10 years working for Merck at their former neuroscience facility near Cambridge. A medicinal chemist by training, Dave was educated at Cambridge before obtaining a PhD at the University of Manchester, followed by post-doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

John Overington

Chief Data Officer - Exscientia

John has over 30 years experience of drug discovery, encompassing large pharma, biotech and academia. After his Ph.D. in Protein Modelling and Structural Bioinformatics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a postdoc at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now CRUK), John joined Pfizer, this was followed by scientific leadership positions at Inpharmatica, EMBL-EBI, Benevolent AI, and just prior to joining Exscientia, at the Medicines Discovery Catapult. John has a track record of innovation and collaborative science and has developed several of the foundation data resources for AI-based drug discovery.

John Davis

Principal Investigator and Unit Director - University of Oxford

John Davis is CSO for the Centre for Medicines Discovery, at the University of Oxford, and Director of Business Development for the Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Alliance.  John is a biochemist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, postdoctoral training carried out at the Ludwig Institute (Middlesex Branch) and an EMBO fellowship at The Salk Institute.  In 1993 he joined SmithKline Beecham as part of the establishment of a neurology research unit within the company and, following the merger to form GlaxoSmithKline, led non-clinical pharmacology research departments for pain and neurodegenerative diseases.  In 2010 John co-founded Convergence Pharmaceuticals, subsequently acquired by Biogen, and has since co-founded a further three start-up companies. In 2015 he joined the University of Oxford to set up and lead the ARUK Oxford Drug Discovery Institute. The institute has developed a portfolio of early drug discovery programmes for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, with an emphasis on genetically validated targets, and has formed several industrial alliances to help prosecute these targets.  John has 25+ years of drug discovery expertise from target to phase IIa and has helped steer a dozen drug candidates into development and to four positive Phase II PoCs. 

Daniel Ebner (Co-Chair)

Academic Chief Scientific Officer for Xcellomics

Principal Investigator - University of Oxford

Daniel Ebner is the Chief Scientific Officer for Xcellomics, a Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford and heads the TDI High Throughput Cellular Screening Facility and the Oxford CRISPR/Cas9 Screening Facility at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI), Centre for Medicines Discovery, Nuffield Department of Medicine. Daniel’s main academic research, through a five year £7M CRUK funded grant in collaboration with researchers from the University of Edinburgh and MIT, is focused on identifying and advancing novel combinatorial therapeutics for the treatment of glioblastoma. As head of the cellular screening facility, Daniel has worked with academic and industrial collaborators to complete >150 research projects and has published >70 peer-reviewed papers in the past 5 years in high impact journals such as the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature and Journal of the American Medical Association across a broad range of pathologies including on neurodegeneration, inflammation, autophagy, large-scale iPSC CRISPR/Cas9 screening methods, and novel more physiologically relevant screening models. Previous to his academic career at the University of Oxford, Daniel has worked for >10 years in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry.

Erin Aho (Co-Chair)

Industrial Chief Scientific Officer for Xcellomics

Associate Director, Biology - Exscientia

Erin has over 10 years of cellular and molecular biology research experience. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Vanderbilt University, where she led the molecular mode of action studies for an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional cancer drug discovery program. Following her graduate studies, she served for 3 years as lead biologist for an oncology small molecule inhibitor program at Forma Therapeutics. Erin has extensive experience in the fields of cancer biology, DNA damage repair, and deciphering complex molecular modes of action for novel small molecule inhibitors. 

Di Jia

Director, Project Biology - Exscientia

Di obtained her Ph.D. in Biology at Purdue University and conducted postdoctoral research in the area of tumour angiogenesis at Harvard Medical School. Prior to joining Exscientia, Di worked as a drug discovery project lead at the Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research and at Merck Research Laboratories. She has led multidisciplinary project teams to find small molecules suitable for clinical development in the areas of immunology and oncology. She also has extensive experience in building genome-wide CRISPR screening and deep mutational scanning pipelines for target identification and in-depth structural/function understanding of novel targets.

Elena Navarro Guerrero

Functional Genomics Head - University of Oxford

Elena is a biotech scientist with a PhD in stem cell biomedicine from University of Seville. She is currently a Senior Postdoc in the High Throughput Cellular Screening Facility at the Target Discovery Institute (University of Oxford). Elena has 6 years of experience developing and producing genome wide CRISPR/Cas9 screenings in diverse biological models, including pancreatic beta cells, hepatocytes, adipocytes, and patient iPSC-derived macrophages. She joined Xcellomics as Head of Functional Genomics.

Otto Morris

Senior Biological Data Scientist - Exscientia

Otto is a Senior Biological Data Scientist at Exscientia, where he applies
bioinformatic and machine learning techniques to support target and
biomarker identification efforts. Prior to Exscientia, he trained in cancer
and stem cell biology, conducting research at the Francis Crick Institute,
Genentech, The Buck Institute for Research on Aging and The Institute of
Cancer Research.

Sneha Anand

Deputy Head of Functional Genomics - University of Oxford

Sneha is currently a postdoctoral scientist in the Cellular High Content Imaging Group led by Daniel Ebner at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI), Centre for Medicines Discovery, University of Oxford. Sneha is responsible for cell-based high-throughput functional genomic screens. Before joining TDI, Sneha worked in Prof. Terry Rabbitt’s group at University of Oxford, where she worked on establishing technologies to target cellular protein function using antibody fragments as drug surrogates. She has experience developing specific and potent reagents to study cancer development and drug-like molecules as leads for therapeutic drug development. Sneha also holds a PhD in infection biology focusing on vaccine development for infectious diseases.

Ashley Adams

Senior Director, Discovery Chemistry - Exscientia

Prior to joining Exscientia, Ashley started her career at AbbVie and was most recently a Team Leader of Discovery Chemistry at GlaxoSmithKline. She has led efforts across the early space of drug discovery including fragment-based drug discovery programs and in targeted protein degradation.  She is currently serving as a Topic Editor for ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.  Before her transition to industry, Ashley obtained her Ph.D. in organic chemistry with Professor Justin Du Bois at Stanford University.