Christian Parker's Biography

Christian Parker, Lab Head, Novartis Institute For Biomedical Research

I grew up in Scotland and received my first degree from Edinburgh University. Then I moved to the University of Bristol, England, to gain a Ph.D. with Prof. Steve Halford, developing a novel method to monitor long range DNA/protein interactions. Following that I obtained a NATO post-doctoral award to study transposition at Yale University with Nigel Grindley. Following this fellowship I joined Procter & Gamble, where I worked in the Skin Care and Pharmaceutical groups. In 1999, I joined the high throughput screening group of Pharmacia in Kalamazoo. While in Kalamazoo I helped Dr. Brian Tripp of Western Michigan University to set up a Master’s degree course in High Throughput Screening. In addition to mentoring a Master’s student through this course I also jointly directed a Post-Doctoral student (Suzanne Schreyer) who developed and evaluated novel screening strategies. In 2003, I left Pharmacia to join the Lead Discovery Group of Novartis in Cambridge, MA., and in 2005 transferred to the Cell Based Screening group in Basel, Switzerland.
My research group is involved with the development, optimization, validation, automation and data analysis of a number of high throughput screens. These are conducted for a number of different therapeutic areas including: anti-infectives, CNS, respiratory, metabolic and cardiovascular disease areas. In addition, I have an active research interest in the evaluation of chemoinformatic methods to aid in the analysis of high throughput screening data sets. As well as reviewing manuscripts for a number of journals including J. Med. Chem. and Nature Biotechnology, I am also a member the the editorial board for the J. Biol. Mol. Screen. Since 2007 I have been involved with the organization of the drug discovery conference MipTec. During the first year with MipTec I was co-Chair of the Poster Session. Then in 2008, I took on the role as co-chair of the program committee and secretary to the session committee.