Dr. Jan Kriegl studied Physics at the University of Ulm, Germany, where he prepared his diploma thesis in 1999. He received his PhD in 2003 from the University of Ulm, working on electron transfer reactions in bacterial photosynthetic reaction centers and ligand binding to heme proteins together with Prof. Uli Nienhaus. In 2003 Jan joined BI as a Postdoc in Computational Chemistry. He initially focused on in-silico modeling of ADMET parameters such as hERG inhibition or drug metabolism, before he started to work as a Computer-Aided Molecular Design scientist in lead identification and optimization projects for respiratory, CNS, and cardiometabolic diseases. Since 2011 Jan is heading the Computational Chemistry group at BI’s research site in Biberach, Germany. His research interests include data mining and statistical modeling, in particular modern machine learning techniques and their application in pharmaceutical drug discovery and development.
Dr. Bernd Beck obtained his Ph.D in Organic Chemistry at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany in 1996. After a PostDoc in Physical Chemistry at the University of Jena he joined Oxford Molecular to develop new chemoinformatic software tools. End of 2001 he joined the chemoinformatics team of Boehringer Ingelheim. Besides the support of CNS research projects he is currently heading a global project team to establish a new data analysis and visualization tool for research data in the global research organization. His research interests include molecular modelling, lead generation/optimization and chemoinformatics especially data mining.
Dr. Peter Haebel studied chemistry at the University of Freiburg and obtained a PhD in protein crystallography at the University of Auckland. After postdoc projects in structural biology and molecular modelling at the ETH Zurich and the University of Marburg, Peter moved into industry. He joined the Chemoinformatics Team of Boehringer Ingelheim in 2007 and is now heading a Computational Chemistry Team supporting drug discovery programmes. His research interests include chemoinformatics, molecular modelling, lead generation and fragment based screening.
Dr. Bernd Wellenzohn studied chemistry at the University of Innsbruck where he also obtained a PhD, working on Molecular Dynamics Simulations of DNA. In 2003 Bernd joined BI as a Postdoc in Computational Chemistry. He initially focused on Virtual Screening and Library Design as member of an Global Skill Center, before he started to work as a Computer-Aided Molecular Design scientist in lead identification and optimization projects. His research interests include molecular modelling, lead generation/optimization and especially virtual screening.
Dr. Nils Weskamp is a Principal Scientist, Computational Chemistry at Boehringer Ingelheim. As part of that role, he supports drug discovery research projects at all stages. He mainly utilizes methods from Chemoinformatics, Data Mining, Predictive Analytics and related disciplines to extract knowledge from the wealth of experimental data that is available at BI internally and externally. Recently, he led a global IT project aimed at bringing complex scientific calculation engines from the high-performance computing environment into the hands of BI’s scientists. Nils holds a master’s degree and a PhD in Computer Science (with a focus on Bioinformatics and Data Mining) from the University of Marburg.