Dr. Hongming Chen studied polymer material engineering in Northwestern Polytechnical University, China, and obtained his PhD in computational chemistry in 1998 from the Institute of Chemical Metallurgy, Chinese Academy of Sciences. After working as postdoctoral fellow in computational chemistry in Bayer Pharma Research Center in Wuppertal, Germany, he joined AstraZeneca R&D Mölndal, Sweden, in 2001. He has been focusing on QSAR modeling and chemoinformatics, and has delivered various predictive tools and computational chemistry support to the AstraZeneca Compound Collection Enhancement and Predictive Chemistry initiatives, as well as to numerous early drug discovery projects. He has authored/coauthored 30 scientific papers and three book chapters.
Dr. Ola Engkvist obtained his PhD in Computational Chemistry at the University of Lund in 1997, and continued with postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and the Czech Academy of Sciences. Between 2000 and 2004, he worked for two Biotech companies before joining AstraZeneca Sweden in late 2004. He is currently team leader in computational chemistry within the Discovery Sciences, Chemistry Innovation Centre. His research interests include cheminformatics, molecular modeling, phenotypic screening, target deconvolution, and open innovation.
Dr. Thierry Kogej obtained his Ph.D in Physical-Chemistry at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Belgium in 1998. Worked at UCB Pharma as a computational chemist to support discovery projects in CNS and rhino-inflammatory (1998-2003). Got a Master in Drug Design at University of Lille (France) in 2000. Joined AstraZeneca R&D Mölndal in 2003. Currently working on several cheminformatic projects related to compound management, reaction informatics and compound collection enhancement through method development and analysis. Support neuroscience lead generation projects and open innovation platform with HTS analysis and early project support.
Dr. Ernst Ahlberg obtained his PhD at the University of Gothenburg. He joined the computational toxicology group at AstraZeneca in 2005. During his 10 years at the company he has performed research in cheminformatics, machine learning and Inverse QSAR. He has been involved in two FP7 EU projects, Aritmo and EU-ADR, where he has developed and implemented methods for evidence integration and worked with machine learning modeling & analysis of clinical and preclinical data. Dr. Ahlberg is currently co-supervisor of a PhD student and supervisor of a master student. He has published 13 research papers, co-authored one book chapter and is the inventor on two patents. Expertise: machine learning, scientific programming, systems development, cheminformatics, QSAR and decision support.
Dr. Lars Carlsson has been working at AstraZeneca R&D for more than ten years and he earned his PhD from Chalmers University of Technology. In this role he has mainly been working on developing and adapting algorithms to solve drug-discovery problems. His work has resulted in several contributions to open-source software for QSAR modeling and descriptors, and he has lead and participated in several research collaborations with academic, company and cross-functional AstraZeneca R&D partners. Furthermore, he has supervised three post-doctoral researchers, co-supervised two PhD students and several master thesis students. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers and co-authored one book chapter.