Prof. Alexandre Varnek got his PhD in physical chemistry from the Institute of Inorganic and General Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. In 1995, Alexandre joined the University of Strasbourg, France, where he holds the position of a Professor in theoretical chemistry, head of the Laboratory on Chemoinformatics and the director of two MSc programs: Master in Chemoinformatics and Master “In Silico Drug Design”. Alexandre is (co)author of 1 monograph, 3 textbooks and more than 170 articles and book chapters.
Dr. Dragos Horvath is a CNRS research director at the Laboratoire de Chemoinformatique, UMR 7140, University of Strasbourg. He is both a developer of chemoinformatics and modeling methodology (machine learning, chemical information management, 3D modeling using massively parallel distributed computational strategies, etc) and a user of chemoinformatics in drug design, at the interface with medicinal chemistry (virtual screening, property prediction). Prior to academic tenureship, Dr. Horvath was active in pharmaceutical industry (global head of modeling at Cerep, 1997-2003, Paris-Seattle), in charge of developing innovative proprietary chemoinformatics tools and models and to herewith support drug discovery. He got his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1996 (joint European partnership between USTL, the University of Lille and the Free University of Brussels), after graduating as a Chemical Engineer (University of Cluj, Romania).
Dr. Gilles Marcou did his initial training in Physics in the University of Lille then went in Paris where he got a DEA of Theoretical Physics (Universities of Paris 6, Paris 7, Polytechnique and ENS) in 1999. He started a PhD in Bordeaux at the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal (CNRS) on the subject of large-scale motions in proteins under the supervision of Dr. J. Elezgaray that he defended in 2003. Then, in 2003-2004, he did a post-doc in drug design in the University of Milano 1 under the supervision of Prof. A. Bernardi, aiming at designing glyco-mimetics to inhibit the cholera toxin. After this experience, in 2004-2006, he joined the group of Dr. D. Rognan at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Strasbourg where he developed post-docking strategies, the Interaction Fingerprints (IFP). He had then the chance in 2006 to join the group of Prof. A. Varnek in the Faculty of Chemistry of Strasbourg as assistant professor. There he continued methodological work focusing on development of molecular descriptors, data-mining approaches, QSAR/QSPR and applications to physicochemical and biological properties. He got in charge of two master degrees: the master of Chemoinformatics in Strasbourg and the master of In Silico Drug Design in Paris. Up to date, DR. Marcou co-authored over 40 publications in international scientific journals (JCIM, Mol Inf,…).