Pierre Baillargeon

Senior Data Architect, TetraScience

Pierre Baillargeon is a Senior Data Architect at TetraScience, where he works at the intersection between science and technology to help biotech and pharma companies bring their R&D data to the scientific data cloud.

Prior to joining TetraScience, Pierre spent 17 years working as a HTS Robotics Engineer in the High-Throughput Screening lab at Scripps Research. At Scripps, Pierre established the Compound Management team when the HTS lab was established in 2005. This team was 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. Pierre was also responsible for administration and development of bioinformatics and cheminformatics tools to support HTS, compound management and associated workflows.

Aside from typical Compound Management and HTS duties, Pierre has also developed, assembled and integrated novel automated hardware and software for drug discovery.

Larry Callahan

Chemist, FDA

Dr. Callahan obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago. Subsequently he has been employed at FDA, NIH, the United States Pharmacopiea (USP) and several government contracting companies. He has been involved in Nucleic Acid, HIV, tuberculosis, and analytical chemistry research. Dr. Callahan’s research accomplishments include elucidating the mechanism of the B-Z DNA transition; the structural correlates in the HIV envelop protein that determine the pathogenicity and infectivity of HIV strains; the mechanism of action of several anti-HIV drugs; the synthesis and use of non-hydrolysable analogs of Adenosine Phosphosulfate and Phosphoryl-Adenosine Phosphosulfate (PAPS) that allowed the purification and cloning of sulfation enzymes. At USP he was responsible for the development of analytical methods for biotechnology-derived products and numerous USP monographs. Dr. Callahan as a contractor was responsible for the management and/or development of chemical/biological databases for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease(ChemDb), the National Library of Medicine (ChemId), and the National Cancer Institute’s Initial Bioimaging Agent Database.

At FDA Dr. Callahan was responsible for the development and management of the Global Substance Registration System (GSRS). The goal of the GSRS is to define all substances in FDA regulated products, assign a Unique Ingredient Identifier (UNII) and create meaningful relationships between substances.  The GSRS at FDA is an agency-wide database that links substances to products, applications, clinical trials, and adverse events.  The GSRS is a collaborative effort between NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and foreign regulatory authorities.  It is a freely distributable database available through NCATS.  https://gsrs.ncats.nih.gov/  Drs. Callahan, Frank Switzer and Herman Diederik were the primary editors of the ISO 11238 Standard for defining substances in medicinal products.   Dr. Callahan is also the FDA lead on the Global Ingredient Archival System (GInAS) project, which attempts to integrate regulatory, toxicological, pharmacology and clinical information on all substances in medicinal products.  Dr Callahan has also been involved in international projects with the European Medicines Agency and WHO.

David A. Hayes

Director, North American Operations; Specs Division, eMolecules

David Hayes holds a Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and has nearly 38 years of experience in drug discovery and development. His career began as an engineer working on small-scale purification of peptides and small molecules. He later transitioned into marketing and sales of HPLC equipment and combinatorial chemistry technologies and services. For the last 21 years, he applied this expertise to lead compound management operations at Specs’ US compound repository in Cumberland, MD, and currently serves as Director of North American Operations. Specs is a Division of eMolecules of San Diego, CA.

Specs Division of eMolecules is a contract compound management company with US operations in Cumberland, MD. David has been employed by Specs for 21 years and currently serves as Director, Specs North American Operations. 

Ajit Jadhav

Director, Digital, Worldwide Research, Development and Medical, Pfizer

Ajit Jadhav is currently a Director at Pfizer where he leads the development of digital solutions for Pfizer’s Research, Development and Medical organizations.  Prior to Pfizer, he had helped establish and subsequently led the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) which was part of the NIH Molecular Libraries Program. He co-created many of the chemical libraries at NIH/NCATS in close collaboration with Paul Shinn and the Automation and Compound Management group. Ajit is the co-inventor of two Phase II and Phase I small molecule therapeutics in clinical trials for orphan indications. Under his leadership, NCGC had developed over 50 high impact small molecule probes with some leading to clinical trials and licensing by biotech startups. He led NCATS' representation at NCI's Chemical Biology Consortium through which several programs advanced to preclinical stages in oncology and out-licensing of patents. Ajit also established the Informatics Group at NCATS which comprised of 22 data scientists and software engineers. He and his colleagues developed several globally utilized informatics platforms including the Inxight Drugs database and Pharos, a knowledgebase for Illuminating the Druggable Genome program. With Trung Nguyen and Noel Southall, his group developed the core platform for FDA’s Global Substance Registration System (G-SRS) in collaboration with Larry Callahan, Tyler Peryea and FDA colleagues. Ajit has co-authored over 160 publications and book chapters and is a co-inventor of 19 issued patents.

Lesley Mathews

Scientific Director, Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening

Mathews earned her Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst followed by a post-doctoral research position at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes for Health (Frederick, MD). She later became a principal scientist in the Oncology Group at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research-Oncology (Cambridge, MA), where she also served as a lead teacher in the community exploration learning lab program. During this time, she obtained an M.Ed. in secondary education and teaching in biology from Lesley University (Cambridge, MA) to combine her passion for science and education leading her to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and now as Scientific Director at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening.

Sam Michael

Chief Information Technology Officer, Director, ITRB, NCATS

Sam Michael is chief of NCATS’s Information Technology Resources Branch where he wears many hats each day within the automation, IT, and security realms of NCATS, championing innovative solutions that keep NCATS’ technology cutting edge.

Sam’s background is in Bioengineering and Biomedical engineering, and he’s been working in the automation/robotics space for over 20 years, 18 of them at NCATS and its precursor. Sam was Paul’s friend and supervisor for more than 16 years.

Kristen Nailor

Principal Scientific Manager, Drug Discovery Sample & Data Management; Lead, Biologics Sample Management, Genentech, Inc.

Kristen Nailor is a Principal Scientific Manager and leader of the Biologics Sample Management Group at Genentech in South San Francisco, CA. She began her career at GlaxoSmithKline where she spent 7 years as a medicinal chemist. She then transitioned into the Sample Management world in 2010 when she accepted a position as the head of Compound Management at Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt, Kristen developed a robust compound management facility and workflows that supported a wide variety of academic drug discovery programs and industry collaborations. After almost 5 years at Vanderbilt, she became the leader of the La Jolla based Compound Logistics team at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson and Johnson in 2014 and key member of the global compound logistics core team. Since 2017, Kristen has been in her current role at Genentech. As interest in biologics and new modalities have grown across the industry, Kristen's passion and vision has been to see biological sample management further expanded and elevated to the same level of throughput, efficiency and impact as small molecule compound management in the drug discovery process. Kristen is also an active volunteer leader and advocate in the broader Sample Management community through the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS). Since 2020 she has served as chair of the SLAS Sample Management Special Interest Group (SIG), on program planning committees for the SLAS Americas Sample Management Symposia from 2021-2023, and most recently had the privilege of serving the broader SLAS community as co-chair of the SLAS 2023 International Conference and Exhibition. Kristen holds a degree in Biochemistry from Indiana University.

Brice A.P. Wilson

Staff Scientist, Molecular Targets Program, Center for Cancer Research, NCI

Brice Wilson is a Staff Scientist in the Molecular Targets Program of the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland. In this capacity he develops biochemical high throughput assays for the discovery of small molecule modulators of proteins important in the context of cancer. These screens are designed to utilize complex libraries of natural products extracts from diverse terrestrial and aquatic organisms as the chemical source material for bioprobe and therapeutic discovery. Following assay development, Brice coordinates the efforts of a team of scientists to implement screening, data analysis, and ultimately natural products discovery to arrive at single chemical agents responsible for the activity observed in the assay. This research effort has recently focused on discovering bioactive agents from the publicly available screening library generated by the NCI Program for Natural Products Discovery (NPNPD). This emerging resource is ultimately anticipated to be composed of 1 million fractions generated from over 125,000 taxonomically diverse species. Brice has utilized this and other natural products libraries in an array of biochemical screening formats and for a variety of oncology related targets including kinases, proteases, DNA modifying enzymes, and ubiquitin ligases.

Prior to his eleven years of research with the Molecular Targets Program, Brice earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine studying the enzymology associated with biomarkers of prostate cancer.

Kelli M. Wilson

Director of Compound Management, NCATS

Kelli Wilson is the director of the Compound Management group in the Information Technology and Research Branch, Research Services Core, within NCATS’ Division of Preclinical Innovation (DPI), where she focuses on collaboration with NCATS scientists who require compounds for screening and other translational science projects. Her role involves compound acquisition, automation and liquid handling process development and consultation for various specialized projects. Additionally, she leads multiple projects related to data science and data-sharing initiatives within DPI.

Wilson joined NCATS in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow under Craig J. Thomas, Ph.D. In this capacity, she conducted research projects using NCATS’ drug combination screening platform to find novel therapies for various cancer indications. These successful projects resulted in initiation of a clinical trial for a marizomib and panobinostat combination therapy for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma patients (NCT04341311) and collaborations with clinicians using the combination of M6620 with topotecan to treat small cell lung cancer (NCT0248709). Additionally, Wilson’s data science projects have focused on sharing NCATS screening data with various partners (e.g., the National Cancer Institute) to facilitate further research.

Wilson earned her doctorate in cellular and molecular medicine from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and her Bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from North Carolina State University. Her doctoral research focused on using patient-derived brain tumor cell lines for high-throughput screening to find novel therapeutics for glioblastoma.