About

Alastair completed his PhD in Pharmacology at Imperial College, London, under the supervision of Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub FRS. He subsequently worked as a developer at Organon/Merck where he developed solutions to automate in-vitro compound testing and analysis. Following this Alastair took a position as Informatics Manager for the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee, managing all data activities of the drug discovery process whilst successfully completing a MSc in Data Science.  

Alex is an experienced investor, banker and entrepreneur, having previously founded Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI) and raised more than £600 million to commercialise world-leading science originating at Oxford University. Prior to that, he spent 20 years in investment banking and fund management, including serving as CEO of hedge fund, Lansdowne Partners, and as founder and CEO of Evolution Group, a UK investment banking and securities firm that was sold to Investec Bank for £232 million in 2011.

Alice is a GPCR pharmacologist having completed her PhD under the supervision of Chris Langmead and Arthur Christopoulos at Monash University in Australia as well as Andrew Lawrence from the Florey Institute in Melbourne, Australia. She also took a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Functional Genomics in Montpellier, France before joining the team at Exscientia.

Amy studied Zoology at the University of Aberdeen and completed an MPhil. in Biology at the University of Nottingham.  Bringing a wealth of experience working as a laboratory technician in academia and industry, she is responsible for maintaining the smooth running of the laboratories at Exscientia.

Andrew is one of the most distinguished and cited scientists in modern drug discovery. As part of his role as founder and CEO of Exscientia, he invented and championed an automated and algorithmic approach to drug design and drug discovery. Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Pfizer and in academia, pioneering cutting-edge projects using data mining and machine learning in the pharmaceutical industry. His papers, published in Nature journals, are widely considered as pivotal points in the new paradigm of modern drug discovery.

Prior to joining Exscientia, Andrew was Senior Group Leader of the Primary Pharmacology Group at global biopharmaceutical company, UCB. While there, he oversaw a team of cellular and molecular pharmacologists responsible for conceiving and delivering complex cellular assays to support small molecule and biological drug discovery. Before that, he spent time in leadership positions at both Oxford Glycosciences and Prolifix. He has a PhD in anti fungal discovery from the University of Bristol.

Andrew is a former Chemistry teacher who has over 10 years experience in the life science industry. He was a study director for different in vitro metabolism groups and has collaborated with many big pharmaceutical companies and research groups whilst in the CRO industry. He now works in the SPR team as a Bioanalytical Scientist for Exscientia having moved across from Kinetic Discovery. Andrew completed his BSc (hons) in Biochemistry at Coventry University.

Andy is one of the world’s leading medicinal chemists. He is a co-inventor of Sildenafil and a contributor to the development of Voriconazole. These medicines have generated sales of nearly $40 billion. Andy was awarded the Technical Achievement Award in Organic Chemistry by the American Chemical Society in recognition for his contributions to medicinal chemistry.

Angeline studied Biochemistry at the University of Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France followed by an MSc in Applied Biomolecular Technology at the University of Nottingham. Most recently she worked on protein production for the study of DNA repair proteins at Structural Genomics Consortium.

Anthony joined Exscientia from OxXChem, a University of Oxford project to develop the tools and culture needed for successful hit-to-lead in fragment-based drug discovery. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California. His PhD focused on developing computational tools to aid in drug design and lead development, which he completed while working at GSK.

Alongside her role at Exscientia, Aude serves as Honorary Lecturer-Group Leader at the University of Leicester, focusing on the structural biology of cancer-related targets. Prior to that, she spent time as a Scientific Coordinator at the Structural Genomics Consortium and as Lecturer-Group Leader at the University of Montpellier. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick.

Ben brings a wealth of industry experience, having joined Exscientia from BenevolentAI where he was the company’s Financial Planning and Analysis Lead. Prior to that, he spent four years in the finance team at Immunocore, a leading biotechnology company focused on delivering first-in-class biological therapies.

Before joining Exscientia, Bill worked for four years in the Computational Chemistry and Chemoinformatics department of biotechnology company, Sygnature Discovery. He completed a PhD at the University of Ioannina before spending time as an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of West Macedonia and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne.

Cara is Exscientia’s Talent Acquisition Manager responsible for the overall hiring strategy and recruitment drive. Prior to joining Cara was an Executive Search Leader experienced in hiring global top talent in Life Sciences across multiple markets. Cara has strong exposure to business growth and scale having built the UK Board and C-Level Drug Discovery network in her former role.

Prior to joining Exscientia, Catarina worked as a Modeler/Computational Chemist at BSIM Therapeutics. There, she contributed to the design of organ-targeted, high-quality drug candidates for the treatment of transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis. She completed her PhD in computational biophysics at the University of Dundee.

Chris completed his PhD at the CCDC and the University of Cambridge, where he studied under the supervision of Professor Sir Tom Blundell FRS FMedSci, and developed  the Fragment Hotspot Maps method. Following this, Chris worked at the EMBL-EBI in the ChEMBL group, incorporating target tractability information into Open Targets.

Chris joins us from the prestigious Saïd Business School at Oxford University, where as Head of HR he led the HR Operations and Wellbeing teams. He was awarded his MA in HR from Oxford Brookes University. Chris is interested in the application of automation and tech to deliver innovative ways to improve the employee experience in an open, collaborative style. 

Daisuke has over 20 years' experience in drug discovery, including a postdoctoral placement at Harvard University with Professor Andrew Myers and management career at Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma. Daisuke heads our Japan office based in Osaka.

Daniel is a bioinformatician with 20 years’ industry experience in Research and Translational informatics. After gaining his D. Phil from Oxford University, he spent nine years at GSK. He then moved to Wyeth to help establish the Translational Medicine Research Collaboration and has recently spent six years in Frankfurt as a department head for Sanofi.

David joined Exscientia in 2019 from the SGC (Structural Genomics Consortium) where he worked as the Senior Informatician leading the development of novel informatics solutions.  Previously he worked in the lab of Professor Anne Dell working on software to automate the analysis of glycomics mass spectrometry experiments. He completed his DPhil in Biochemistry at the University of Sussex.

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.

Emil is a young addition to the company who brings a strong mathematical and computer science background. He pursued these fields from an early age and proved his competence by winning many awards such as the Golden Medal for the Romanian Maths Olympiad. Before joining Exscientia, he finished his Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Oxford.

Eva joined Exscientia from the Research Data Management team at University of St Andrews where she worked as Data Scientist and Research Data Officer. She holds a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of St Andrews and previously pursued four years' of postdoctoral research into neurodegenerative diseases at St Andrews and the University of Edinburgh before completing an MSc in Management and Information technology.

Frauke joined the Biophysical Drug Discovery Team at Exscientia after completing a PhD in Physical Chemistry at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She is experienced in method development in spectroscopy for structural biology applications. Her background is in Chemistry and she also enjoys programming. Prior to her PhD, she spent time as a research assistant at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and the University of Toronto in Canada. 

Heather has over 20 years' experience as a Clinical Monitor and Project Manager in Clinical Research Trials Phases I - IV. She began her career with five years at contract research organisation, Quintiles, before moving into mid-large pharma. She has overseen numerous global and mega trials at Schering Plough, MSD, Pfizer and Novartis, across a variety of therapy areas including CNS, women's health, oncology and cardiovascular.

Henry is strengthen our 3D structure team following a postdoctoral role at the Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Oxford where he worked in the Membrane Protein Structure and Function group led by Dr Katharina Duerr with an emphasis of structural studies by cryo-EM. Prior t that he completed a PhD in Structural Enzymology with Prof Gideon Grogan at the University of York on a range of oxidoreductases, with structural studies reinforced by X-ray crystallography.

Iva is at the forefront of some of Exscientia’s most challenging and rewarding research, combining this role with her position as an Independent Investigator at the University of Dundee. Prior to joining, she served as Chief Scientific Officer at Kinetic Discovery and as Principal Scientist at Pfizer. She also completed a PhD in biochemistry at Masarykova Univerzita.

Jérémy is a co-inventor of the original Exscientia technology for the Automated Design of ligands to Polypharmacological Profiles, which was developed during his PhD and published in Nature. Jérémy graduated with a French Diplôme d’Ingénieur Chimiste from Ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie de Montpellier and gained a MSc in Chemical Biology from the University of Montpellier II in 2008.

John is an experienced full stack software developer. After gaining a double first from the University of Cambridge he has worked on many projects, from websites viewed by millions, to self-driving cars and fish counting AI. He is excited by the potential for ML to revolutionise drug discovery, biomedical research and is passionate about growing the ML community.

With a BSc in physics from the Warwick University and MSc in computer science from the University of Bristol, Jonathan brings extensive technical experience from over 10 years in senior technical roles, consulting on strategic data projects delivering significant improvements in capability for the UK and US governments.

Katie joined the Pharmacology team at Exscientia after completing an early career industry fellowship at Bicycle Therapeutics in Cambridge where she carried out high-throughput screening of bicyclic peptide libraries. With a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of Warwick, Katie is applying her experience to developing assays for high-interest membrane protein targets.

Laksh graduated from the University of Cambridge with a double first in Chemistry, finishing 2nd in his year, followed by an 8-week internship at Exscientia. There, he invented, implemented and deployed Colaboron (a deep learning algorithm to predict protein-ligand affinity trained on millions of molecules), amongst other things. He then completed an investment banking internship at Commerzbank before starting at Exscientia as a machine learning engineer.

Following 10 years as a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Oxford, Louise now oversees Exscientia’s research into the structure, function and biochemical significance of proteins, helping us continue to push the boundaries of AI drug development. She completed a PhD in the genetic engineering of brewing yeast.

Mario is a Member of the Supervisory Board of drug discovery and development company, Evotec. He has extensive experience as a Non-Executive Director within the healthcare industry, having also held positions at Forge Therapeutics and Pharminox. Prior to that, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Evotec and was a Founding Chemist of Oxford Asymmetry International. He received a doctorate in mechanistic organometallic chemistry from the University of Oxford before continuing there with post doctoral studies on aspects of the biosynthesis of penicillins.

Marius is a part of the AI & Technology Team at Exscientia. Prior to joining, he spent half a year in the A* Star Research Institute in Singapore where he was working on keyphrase extraction and compression of large neural networks using reinforcement learning. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a first class degree in AI and Computer Science. His research work at the university was based around knowledge systems and theory repair algorithms.

Mark spent seven years working in Japan at the Protein Engineering Research institute in Osaka, Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. (now Astellas) and Helix Research Institute. Upon returning to the UK, he worked at Inpharmatica Ltd., a biotechnology company focusing on knowledge-based drug discovery founded by Dame Professor Janet Thornton FRS.

Martin joins Exscientia as an experienced pharmacologist. After gaining a PhD in Pharmacy from the University of Nottingham, he joined Sygnature Discovery in the biosciences department focusing on enzymology and biophysics. This was followed by a move to UCB Pharma where he worked in the structural biology and primary pharmacology groups, ultimately leading the internal molecular pharmacology team, covering a broad range of targets and modalities.

Millie is Exscientia’s office manager and brings over three years of office and administration management experience to the team. She was previously Senior Restaurant Manager at Gee's Restaurant, in Oxford and has a Bachelor in Liberal Arts and Sciences, Humanities and General Studies from Colégio São Jorge dos Ilhéus.

Having gained a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, Milly subsequently stepped into the world of commercial strategy, which she now leads at Exscientia. Prior to that, she spent time as a Director at Huron Management Consulting and as a Consultant in Global Pricing and Market Access for Evidera, a leading global contract research organisation within pharmaceutical product development.

Mima provides a wide range of support to the Exscientia Executive Team. Prior to joining the company, she spent a number of years in the hospitality and events industry, working as Front Office Manager at the Old Bank Hotel, Senior Meetings and Events Coordinator at the Four Pillars Hotel and Senior Assistant Manager at Vanbrugh House Hotel.

After a degree in Chemistry from Warwick, an MSc in Computational Chemistry from Cardiff and undertaking research for a PhD in Computational Crystallography also from Cardiff, Nathan worked in the pharmaceutical industry followed by six years working at ChEMBL in Hinxton as well as one year cutting his software development teeth at a startup based out of Sydney. 

Ola gained a 1st class AI and Computer Science degree at the University of Edinburgh. During her degree she found passion for Reinforcement Learning completing a summer research project at the California Institute of Technology and subsequently a half year project in the A*STAR Research Institute in Singapore. She brings key insights and expertise to apply Reinforcement Learning methods to drug discovery in the AI and Technology Team at Exscientia.

Olivier is a highly accomplished drug discoverer, with over 15 years’ experience gained in biotech, CRO, research institutes and academia. Prior to joining Exscientia he held a Team Leader position in medicinal chemistry at Evotec, managing research across a variety of disease areas. A medicinal chemist by training, Olivier obtained a PhD from Newcastle University on DNA damage response inhibitors in collaboration with KuDOS, and spent 6 years working on anticancer therapeutics at the ICR, London.

With experience of working at leading scientific research facilities all over the world, Patrick is responsible for overseeing some of Exscientia’s most exciting breakthroughs. Before joining the company, he served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Diamond Light Source and as a Visiting Scientist at the Structural Genomics Consortium. He completed a PhD in structural biology at top Australian institution, Griffith University.

Patrizia joined Exscientia in 2019 having completed her PhD in biological sciences at Università di Pavia. She also spent time as a PhD Researcher at the Structural Genomics Consortium, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to catalyse research in new areas of human biology and drug discovery by focusing on less well-studied areas of the human genome.

Paul is working in the AI and Technology Team at Exscientia. Before joining he spent six months at a startup, working on the development of an autonomous wildfire detection and suppression system. He recently completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Liverpool, focusing on formal verification techniques for the analysis of Markov models.

Peter gained his PhD in organic chemistry with Stan Roberts at University of Liverpool followed by a postdoctoral and lectureship position with Gerry Pattenden at University of Nottingham. He then joined Incenta-Amura to develop cysteine protease inhibitors, followed by a decade at Organon, Schering-Plough and Merck(MSD) working as a project leader on CNS and CV therapeutic areas. This was followed by a Group leader position at UCB and then leading the University of Dundee Gates and Wellcome Trust funded TB research programs.

Philipp joined Exscientia from NZP-UK in Reading where he worked in the process development lab for the synthesis of bile acids. Prior to that he received his DPhil in organic chemistry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Stephen P. Fletcher. During this course he investigated asymmetric syntheses of small building blocks found in natural products and natural product derivatives.

Reid is an expert in GPCR research where he has developed next-generation biosensors to interrogate nearly all GPCR signaling pathways in parallel with extremely high-fidelity. These tools enable direct, unbiased and automated analysis of ligand-receptor-transduction relationships. Reid trained under Prof Bryan Roth at the University of North Carolina.

Richard completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he studied under the supervision of Professor Sir Tom Blundell FRS FMedSci. Prior to that, he was a Senior Scientist at Inpharmatica, a London-based biotech for five years. In 2012, after joining the University of Dundee, Richard received the College of Life Sciences Innovator of the Year Award.

After a degree in chemistry at Imperial College, Richard worked in various scientific research and consultancy roles at Thomson Scientific, Inpharmatica and Biovia (now Dassault Systèmes).

Rob draws from experience working as a software and data engineer across a range of sectors including finance, advertising, security, and bioinformatics. He now pools that knowledge to find ways to maximise the scalability and performance of the infrastructure underpinning the Exscientia platform.

Ross gained a PhD in immunology at the University of York followed by a post doctorate at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine where he developed the first high-content image machine learning platform for drug discovery against neglected tropical diseases. This work resulted in the first new late-lead drug to fight schistosomiasis for several decades. Subsequently Ross led a team at UCB responsible for in vitro assay development and pharmacology for early and late stage drug discovery projects. 

Sean’s recent promotion to Senior Bioanalytical Scientist follows roles as a Bioanalytical Scientist at both Kinetic Discovery and Exscientia. Prior to that, he spent several years in academia, serving as Physical Sciences Teacher at St. Andrew's College and Chemistry Senior Tutor and Demonstrator at the Stellenbosch University. He completed his PhD in inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford.

After a career in research at the University of Dundee, first studying protein phosphorylation and then reproductive health, Senga moved into project management and administration covering multiple international projects.

Simon is Exscientia’s Senior Cloud Engineer, responsible for all cloud infrastructure and systems.  Prior to Exscientia, Simon spent a decade in System Administration and High Performance Computing roles for the Life Sciences department at the University of Dundee.  Simon gained a BSc Hons in Web Development at the University of Abertay Dundee.

Simon is an experienced IT professional, having previously held engineer and analyst roles at Step One Finance and Abingdon and Witney College respectively. He has served as an Audio and Lighting Engineer and Music Technician, and is also a professional Yo-Yo Demonstrator in his spare time.

As part of the Protein Science Group, Simon is tasked with conducting research into the structure, function and biochemical significance of proteins. Prior to joining the company, he held a similar role at Kinetic Discovery and served as a Postdoctoral Research Technician at the University of Edinburgh. He has a PhD in structural and molecular biology.

Simone has a wealth of scientific research experience, which he uses to help determine the structure of large biomolecules that provide crucial information in drug development. Prior to joining Exscientia, he served as a Senior Research Scientist at Kinetic Discovery and as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Diamond Light Source. He completed a PhD in biochemistry at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

After finishing a degree in Business and Economics, Steve spent the early 2000’s in Local Authority IT developing and managing large complex environments before moving into the education sector with RM until 2012. From there he moved into the secure IT space, firstly with Sophos as their Global Infrastructure Architect leading multinational teams and company IT strategy and subsequently to Prolinx where he was Senior Solution Architect and Development Team Manager.

Vackar is a full-stack Software Engineer with a wealth of experience in both commercial and research environments . He spent over a decade leading development efforts of a number of high profile projects across various groups at the University of Dundee. He was trained in Physics and Applied Computing at the University of Dundee, specialising in Applied Computing. This was subsequently followed by a masters in Computer Science from Lancaster University.

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. 

Willem gained a PhD in computational chemistry in the group of David Reinhoudt at the University of Twente followed by a post doctorate at Yale. He subsequently spent a decade at Pfizer focusing on computational techniques for HTS triage and combinatorial library design. This was followed by a position as Senior Solutions Consultant at Accelrys assisting a range of clients from small biotech to big pharma.