Lourdes Cucurull-Sanchez (Chair)

Dr Lourdes Cucurull-Sanchez has 18 years of experience in the Pharma industry. As part of the model-informed drug discovery and development (MID3) paradigm, she currently drives the implementation of QSP modelling strategies at GSK, with focus on the Oncology Development portfolio at GSK. She has a passion for embedding innovative modelling methods into decision-making in order to reduce drug attrition. She is a founder and active board member of the UK QSP Network, where she led the publication of a set of recommendations on best practices to maximize QSP model impact and repurposing. She is also a GSK Fellow and a member of the IQ Consortium QSP WG2, ASCPT and ISoP.

Lourdes joined GSK in 2012, initially as a QSP modelling manager in the Computational Biology group, and currently as a director in the Clinical Pharmacology Modelling and Simulation department. Prior to GSK, she spent 8 years modelling at Pfizer, firstly as a as a machine learning (ML) computational chemist and later on as a QSP modeler under the management of Piet van der Graaf. She was awarded a W.E. Upjohn Award (2007) in the area of Innovation, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge (QSAR and Machine Learning, 2004), PhD in Chemistry (Quantum Chemistry, 2000) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and MPhil in Chemistry (X-ray Crystallography, 1995) at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Anna Georgieva Kondic (Chair-Elect)

Dr. Anna Kondic currently works in the Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacometrics groups at Bristol Myers Squibb where she is responsible for all the pharmacometrics support in oncology, hematology and cell-based therapies. Anna has worked as a quantitative scientist in various therapeutic areas and companies over the last 22 years and has extensive experience in both mechanistic and empirical model across the whole spectrum of R&D, as well as reimbursement. She holds a PhD in mathematics from Duke University and MBA from Stern School of Business at New York University. Anna is particularly passionate about the use of quantitative methods to make personalized medicine a reality, especially for cancer patients. 

Anna is a competitive master artistic swimmer, participating in both national and international meets. She is particularly proud of having been the captain for the Merck Rhode Island team for Swim Across America in 2018. The charity swim that year raised more than 700 000 for cancer research at the Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, RI.

Cesar Pichardo (Vice Chair)

Dr. Cesar Pichardo currently works in Systems Medicine at AstraZeneca (part of the Clinical Pharmacology and Safety Science Department) providing support with mechanistic modelling for drug development in oncology and other therapeutic areas. Cesar has worked as a Modelling and Simulation scientist in various companies and environments for more than 20 years, including FMCG (Unilever), big pharma (Pfizer), finance (Moody’s), pharma consultancy services (Xenologiq and Certara) and academia (University College London, University of Sheffield and INSA Lyon).

He is a Chemical Engineer graduated from Simon Bolivar University (Venezuela), holds a MSc. In Systems Engineering from the same university and a PhD in Applied Maths from Ecole Centrale de Lille (France). Cesar is passionate about knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation. He actively engages with colleagues worldwide, aiming to drive QSP advancements through exchange of ideas. He is also a member of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering's "Chemical Engineering as Applied to Medicine" section which reflects his commitment to bridging the gap between disciplines and inspiring future generations in this exciting intersection of engineering and healthcare. 

Krina Mehta (Communications Director)

Krina Mehta is a director of pharmacometrics at Kyowa Kirin Inc., where she supports the incorporation of model-informed drug development approaches, including QSP, for effective and efficient drug development for oncology and rare disease therapeutics. She possesses more than 12 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in various areas, with a focus on quantitative pharmacology for the past 8 years. She holds a MS in Pharmacometrics from University of Maryland, USA, and BPharm from Saurashtra University, India. Along with her role at Kyowa Kirin, Krina has worked on mechanistic approaches to evaluate treatment optimization of anti-tuberculosis therapeutics as part of her PhD dissertation at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Marissa Renardy (Secretary)

Dr. Marissa Renardy is a principal scientist in the modeling group at Applied BioMath, where she uses QSP and semi-mechanistic PKPD modeling to support drug development. She holds a BS/MS from Virginia Tech and MS/PhD from The Ohio State University, all in Mathematics. Prior to joining Applied BioMath, Marissa was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Kirschner Lab at University of Michigan Medical School where she worked on epidemic and within-host modeling of tuberculosis. She received the ISoP Emerging Scientist Award at ACoP14.

Ioannis (Yannis) P. Androulakis (Past Chair)

Dr.Ioannis (Yannis) P. Androulakis is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Department of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering, and holds an Adjunct faculty position in the Department of Surgery at the Rutgers – Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He has a BS degree from NTUA, Athens, Greece; MS/Ph.D. from Purdue University, all in Chemical Engineering followed by postdoctoral training at Princeton University. Before joining Rutgers, he was with ExxonMobil's Corporate Strategic Research Laboratories in NJ for several years, where he eventually became a technical program leader. His research focuses on quantitative systems biology and pharmacology of inflammation, emphasizing the interactions between the circadian, endocrine, and immune systems. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.