Board of Directors

Christoph joined the board in 2011.

Frank represented Accelrys on the board until its merger with Symyx in 2010; he rejoined the board in 2011. Frank is presently senior vice president and chief science officer at Accelrys. Generally recognized as the originator of the term "cheminformatics," Frank has spent the last 20 years of his career innovating new scientific methods and applying them in commercial pharmaceutical enterprises. From 1997 to 2006, Frank held positions of increasingly responsibility at Johnson & Johnson, culminating in the position of senior research fellow within the office of the CIO. He has served on the editorial boards of a number of scientific journals and professional magazines and is a past chairman of the American Chemical Society's "Computers in Chemistry" section. Frank holds a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh, did post-doctoral studies in biophysics at UCSF, and currently serves as an adjunct associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s School of Pharmacy.

A board member since 2010, Joe is senior vice president of global sales at Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science. Joe has more than twenty years of executive level entrepreneurial and board experience in global life sciences and technology companies, including MDL Information Systems Inc., Spotfire Inc. and LION bioscience AG. He holds degrees in chemistry and computer science from Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania. Joe considers his involvement in the Pistoia Alliance an exciting opportunity to lead change by creating an ecosystem that leverages the expertise of all members to help address common problems shared across the pharmaceutical industry.

Alex has been a member of the board since June 2009, where he has been instrumental in structuring both the board and the organization to support its long-term strategic goals. Alex notes that greater interoperability and standards are clearly in the interests of the industry as a whole and certainly fit the strategic aims of ChemAxon, where he is CEO. Prior to ChemAxon, Alex was founder and CEO/CFO of ThalesNano, which received the R&D 100 Award and Hungarian SME of the Year Award, and CFO of ComGnex, a chemistry services company. Altogether Alex has over 10 years experience in managing service companies for research and discovery. In his previous career Alex worked in international banking, starting at NatWest and later as vice president at ABN AMRO in London and Budapest.

Ramesh directs molecular sciences and candidate optimization informatics at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Prior to this role, he held an enterprise architecture position, developing governance and integration strategies across R&D at BMS. Ramesh also spent several years at Tripos, both as a computational chemist and an informatics consultant.  He received his BA in chemistry and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Virginia. Ramesh has a passion for developing precompetitive collaborations through Pistoia. In addition to his board position, he served as communications officer for the Pistoia Alliance operational team from 2009-2010 and has spoken at numerous conferences about the potential and progress of Pistoia initiatives.

Sean joined the board in 2011. He is prinicipal at Collaborations in Chemistry and collaborations director at Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc., as well as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. Sean has published over 170 papers and book chapters on computational and in vitro drug discovery approaches and co-edited Collaborative Computational Approaches for Biomedical Reseach (Wiley, 2011). His research interests include ADME/Tox models, open source technologies, database quality, neglected disease research, and mobile device applications for science (www.scimobileapps.com).

A founding member of the Pistoia Alliance, Tom is vice president of discovery information technology at GlaxoSmithKline.

Claus joined the board in June 2009 representing one of the first non-founding companies to join the Alliance. He has held roles of increasing responsibility at Lundbeck since 1997 and is currently chief specialist of global research informatics. He is engaged in several precompetitive activities in addition to Pistoia; he is a member of PRISME and has served as PM for the second round of IMI knowledge management calls and the EFPIA cookie jar pilot project. Claus completed his M.Sc.(pharm) degree in medicinal chemistry from Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences and also holds a diploma in software development from the Engineering College of Copenhagen and an E-MBA from INSEAD in France.

Bryn gained his BSc and PhD in pharmacology from the University of Bristol, UK. Following post-doctoral work in neuropharmacology, he held various roles in high throughput screening and lead discovery informatics at Organon, Zeneca, and AstraZeneca, culminating in his position as head of Discovery Informatics at AstraZeneca’s Cheshire, UK, sites in 2004. In 2006, Bryn joined Roche, where he is currently global head of informatics in Pharma Research and Early Development.

Roche joined the Pistoia Alliance in 2009, and Bryn joined the Board. The main motivation is to contribute to the development of a cross-organization service landscape for life-science informatics and information services—leading to reduced duplication and cost together with broader and richer functionality in the precompetitive space.

Alexander has worked in R&D for more than 12 years and currently serves as director, informatics and knowledge management at Merck Serono, where he is responsible for all research informatics and knowledge management activities. He is also involved in public-private partnerships at Merck Serono. Alexander brings a great interest in open innovation and collaborative discovery to the board of the Pistoia Alliance, which he joined in 2010. 

Michael is general manager, informatics, at Perkin Elmer following the acquisition of Cambridgesoft in 2011, where he was vice president, corporate development. Michael has more than 20 years of experience in scientific software and informatics. Prior to Perkin Elmer, he was vice president of global marketing and eBusiness at Life Technologies, responsible for industry-leading web, bioinformatics, and eCommerce activities. Prior to Life Technologies, Michael spent 11 years at Accelrys. In particular, as chief operating officer, he was responsible for launching Accelrys in 2001 as a result of the integration of Molecular Simulations, Synopsys, Oxford Molecular Group, and Genetics Computer Group. Michael has a Ph.D. in chemistry and has undertaken research at Cornell University and British Petroleum.