Track 1 Keynote Speakers

Rathnam Chaguturu Founder and CEO/Senior Director, SRI International Rathnam Chaguturu is the Founder & CEO of iDDPartners, a nonprofit think-tank focused on pharmaceutical innovation. He has more than thirty-five years of experience in academia and industry, managing new lead discovery projects and forging collaborative partnerships with academia, disease foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies.. He is the Founding President of the International Chemical Biology Society, a Founding Member of the Society for Biomolecular Sciences, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening. He serves on several editorial- and scientific advisory boards, recipient of several awards, and is a sought-after speaker at major national and international conferences, passionately advocating the virtues of collaborative partnerships in addressing the pharmaceutical innovation crisis. ‘Collaborative Innovation in Drug Discovery: Strategies for Public and Private Partnerships,’ edited by Rathnam with the Foreword by Ferid Murad, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, has just been published by Wiley.
Steve Rees Vice President, AstraZeneca Steve Rees is currently Vice-President of Screening Sciences and Sample Management at AstraZeneca with global responsibility for High Throughput Screening, Compound Management, the human tissue BioBank and the provision of SAR biology support to preclinical discovery projects. Prior to joining AstraZeneca, Steve worked at GlaxoSmithKline for 24 years in various roles including that of Director of the Screening and Compound Profiling Department at GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage. Steve has been responsible for developing hit identification, compound profiling and compound management strategies for AstraZenenca and previously GlaxoSmithKline. Steve has led multiple international collaborations and has sponsored the development and implementation of a range of cellular assay technologies for ion channel, GPCR and other target classes. Steve has authored >60 scientific papers and has spoken at many international symposia including three occasions at the Society of Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS). He is currently Chair of the SLAS Europe Council . He is a member of the BBSRC panel of experts and is a member of the Board of Directors of ELRIG.