2019 Americas Sample Management Symposium

Jeffrey Gross is a senior director with GlaxoSmithKline, and heads the Screening, Profiling, and Mechanistic Biology group in Upper Providence, PA. He joined GSK in 2001 after a postdoctoral at the University of Wisconsin. During his 18 years with GSK, he has worked in early discovery and developed expertise in many of the core discovery platforms, including high throughput screening, encoded library technology, and fragment-based drug discovery. Throughout his career at GSK, he has maintained a role in assay development, biophysics, and in the weekly in vitro profiling assay work for lead optimization campaigns. A recent focus has been developing scientific approaches in hit qualification, as a strategy to improve the quality and success of discovery efforts. Jeff received a PhD from Temple University, where he studied enzymology, elucidating the mechanism of enzymes in the NAD biosynthesis pathway. His post-doctoral studies were done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he used pre-steady state kinetics, kinetic isotope effects, and mass spectrometry to evaluate reaction mechanisms and intermediates.

Dr. Stauffer directs the newly formed Cleveland Clinic Center for Therapeutics Discovery initiated in 2018. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry 1999 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under John Katzenellenbogen and did post-doctoral studies with John Hartwig at Yale University before joining Merck & Co. in 2001. While at Merck he worked on drug discovery teams in several therapeutic areas, including Alzheimer’s disease, pain, and cardiovascular disease. In 2008 Dr. Stauffer moved to Vanderbilt University where he built and led several discovery teams, including industry and NIH sponsored neuroscience and cancer drug discovery projects. He is a co-author on over 80 peer reviewed publications and has 28 issued US patents. His interests lie in allosteric modulation, structure-based design, catalysis, and reaction discovery as tools towards enabling problem solving in medicinal chemistry. His therapeutic and target interests include cancer drug discovery, neurodegenerative disease, epigenetics, and metabolomics.

Nicolas Zorn is currently the head of the Compound Library Enhancement and Logistics team at Roche pRED in Basel within The Small Molecule Research, Lead Discovery organization. Nicolas is an Organic Chemist by training (Ph.D. at the University of Paris 6, PostDoc at Indiana University, US) and has worked for 10 years supporting and driving projects in several disease areas as medicinal chemist and computational chemist at Merck MDS in the USA, then Roche in Switzerland. In the last four years, he has led the Compound Library Enhancement and Logistics team in Basel where all samples are processed and distributed for Small Molecule Research in pRED.

Dr. Marshall is the head of Clinical Biomarker Technologies in Early Clinical Development, Pfizer. His group is responsible for the development and validation of novel biomarkers in early clinical trials, spanning mass spec, flow cytometry, ligand binding and genetic biomarkers.

Viral Vyas is a Lead IT Business Partner at Bristol Myers Squibb responsible for leading teams that deliver informatics capabilities to broad range of scientific stakeholders in the Translational Medicine organization. He received his undergraduate education in Microbiology and Masters in Information Management. Viral Joined Bristol Myers Squibb in 2000 as an Associate Research Scientist in DMPK group and transitioned into R&D IT in 2004. Viral has worked on numerous informatics initiatives that streamlined laboratory workflows. He is passionate about creating informatics strategies that allow scientists to focus on creating scientific knowledge rather than manually assembling and reporting data.

Pierre is currently the Senior Robotics Engineer within the Lead Identification lab at Scripps Research where he supports Compound Management, High Throughput Screening, Assay Development and Informatics efforts by developing, assembling and integrating novel automated hardware and software. Pierre has worked at Scripps Research since the establishment of the lab in 2005. The Lead Identification lab at Scripps is responsible for supporting both industrial and academic drug discovery efforts with a proprietary >600,000 sample library and the NIH's >300,000 sample MLPCN collection.

Over the past decade at Scripps, Pierre has lead engineering efforts on several novel laboratory instruments including the Plate Auditor microplate inspection platform and most recently the Microplate Assistive Pipetting Light Emitter.

Carla R. Alpert is a cell biologist with 25+ years in the cell culture suite. She still remembers the first cell line she handled, the enigmatic and adorable mouse line Neuro-2a. Since those days, Carla's grown hundreds of human and mammalian cell lines and within her department is sometimes called the cell "guru" -- a term she finds very amusing. Carla's applied her cell skills toward cell based assay development, live cell imagine (loves the IncuCyte platform), and managing cell repositories. When not in the cell suite, she enjoys horseback riding, amateur photography and a good book.

Nadia completed her Master in Biotechnology at the Ecole National Superieure de Technologie des Biomolecules de Bordeaux (ENSTBB, France). She joined GSK (Stevenage, UK) in 2006 and focussed her career in Biopharmaceutical discovery with an emphasis on characterization of Antibodies and Antibody-like molecules.
More recently, Nadia joined a newly formed Biological licensing centre of excellence in GSK Pharma R&D which remit is to oversee compliance to license restrictions associated with Biological materials and technologies.

Ms. Song currently holds the position of Director of Controlled Substance Compliance at Merck Co. Inc. With over 20 years’ experience in pharmaceutical industry, she has broad experience in manufacturing, packaging, Quality Assurance, technology transfer, business compliance and controlled substance compliance, both domestically and internationally. Ms. Song currently oversees Merck’s controlled substance compliance programs globally, including research, clinical and commercial manufacturing, packaging, and distribution, ensuring compliance with federal, state and international regulations. Ms. Song received her Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Eastern China University of Science and Technology.

Chair, Controlled Substance Expert Group (Pistoia Alliance) The group shares best practice, learns from external experts and collaborates to improve understanding of current issues in controlled substance legislation and is part of the Pistoia Alliance, a global, not-for-profit members’ organization working to lower barriers to innovation in life science and healthcare R&D through pre-competitive collaboration.

Jefferson Chin is a Senior Scientist in the Compound Management & Distribution at Pfizer located in Groton, Ct. Jeff has a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the University of New Haven.  Jeff has over 30 years of experience in analytical chemistry, organic synthesis and finally compound management. He uses his experience to be the “voice of reason” while interacting with the chemists or biologist and developing new analytical workflows to extend CMD’s capabilities.