Scientific Advisory Board

Jan W.F. Wasley, Ph.D., is the Chairman of SynChem’s Scientific Advisory Board. He is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Institutes of Pharmaceutical Discovery in Branford Connecticut and the former Vice President of Business Development and Director of Chemistry at Neurogen. He became involved in the development of Neurogen's Accelerated Intelligent Drug Design (AIDD) technologies. AIDD integrates Neurogen's successful combinatorial chemistry program with high-throughput screening capabilities, complementary both with state-of-the-art robotics and proprietary interactive data system. Dr. Wasley's scientific background lies in organic and medicinal chemistry. He received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962 from Prof. A.W. Johnson at the University of Nottingham, England for his work in the synthesis of pyrroles, porphyrins and related macrocycles. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship (1962-1964) at the National Research Council of Canada, where he worked on the elucidation of chlorobium chlorophylls with Dr. A.S. Holt, Dr. Wasley joined the Research Division of Geigy Pharmaceuticals in 1965 as a Senior Chemist. Dr.Wasley held positions of increasing responsibility within the Research Department of Ciba-Geigy in drug discovery and drug development activities and most recently was responsible for identifying and implementing new technologies and managing external collaborations. He has over 39 years of experience in the design, discovery, and development of novel drugs for a wide variety of diseases, and has over 90 publications and patents in the area of medicinal chemistry.

 

Richard B. Silverman, Ph.D., is a Charles Deering McCormick Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. Professor Silverman is a leader of organic and medicinal research in Chemistry, particularly in the field of molecular mechanisms of action, rational design, and syntheses of potential medicinal agents that act as specific enzyme inhibitors. Throughout his tenure at Northwestern University, he was awarded numerous awards, the most recent being an ACS Arthur C. Cope Senior Scholar Award. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Letters of Drug Design & Discovery, and a former member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. He also is the author of “The Organic Chemistry of Drug Design and Drug Action”, “Mechanism-Based Enzyme Inactivation: Chemistry and Enzymology”.

Prof. Silverman received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry in 1968 at Pennsylvania State University and his Ph.D. in 1969 at Harvard University, a Postdoctoral Fellowship (1974-1976) at Brandeis University. He has more than 200 publications and 34 patents and 4 books in his research.