RSC Medicinal Chemistry Desktop Seminar Series

Sally-Ann Poulsen is Professor and Deputy Director (acting) at Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD), Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. She holds a PhD in medicinal chemistry also from Griffith University, receiving a University Medal for academic excellence. Immediately following her PhD she was recipient of a Royal Society & National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Howard Florey Research Fellowship to undertake research at the University of Cambridge. On returning to Australia, she was awarded an Australian Research Council QEII Fellowship, followed by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.
 
Prof. Poulsen works with collaborators in Australia and internationally, both from academia and industry on projects related to development of new chemical probes, medicinal chemistry targeting cancer and infectious disease, and fragment screening using native state mass spectrometry. Her research is defined by the application of chemistry expertise to address complex questions across biology.
 
Prof. Poulsen was appointed as a Fellow, Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) in 2017. She is Chair elect of the RACI Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology Division and is a global council member of the International Chemical Biology Society. She is author of >100 publications in the field of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.

Yoshinori Ikeura obtained a PhD from Kyoto University by studying of Tachykinin NK receptor antagonists in 1999 and worked on natural products synthesis at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow until 2000.
 
He joined the Medicinal Chemistry Laboratories of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd in 1986. In 2011, he became the head of Inflammation Drug Discovery Unit at Pharmaceutical Research Division. Ikeura assumed the head of General Manager Office in 2012 and since 2014 he also held the post of the Site Head at Shonan Research Center in Japan.
 
He is currently CEO of Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc. since July 2017. Axcelead is Japan’s first provider of integrated drug discovery services- a one stop-shop for research providing.