Operational Team

John joined the Pistoia Alliance in 2010 to direct the delivery of the Alliance's working groups and serve as the primary liaison between the project teams and the operational team and board. He is committed to encouraging pharma to use expert, third-party, cost-effective, regulatory-compliant, hosted information services. In addition to his position with the Alliance, John also serves as secretary of the PRISME Forum. Previously, John has held Informatics leadership roles in a variety of organizations including the University of London, Sandoz, ICRF, Roche, Ipsen, and Daiichi Sankyo. In these roles, John has gained direct hands-on experience writing analytical software, teaching computation, delivering IT services, and providing computer-based services to the discovery, non-clinical development, clinical development, and regulatory affairs domains of the life-science industry.

One of the founders of the Pistoia Alliance, Nick served as president until 2011. He now serves as the Alliance's primary contact with other standard bodies and will be instrumental in "signposting" to initiatives relevant to Pistoia Alliance projects. He is chemistry domain architect in the discovery information department at AstraZeneca, where he has worked on a range of projects for R&D involving integration of chemistry and project data, predictive science, and the sample management supply chain. In these roles, he has delivered business change and approaches to business rules and vocabularies in parallel with informatics delivery. Nick has worked in computational sciences for over 15 years, holding positions at biotechs such as Tripos and Xenova and consulting for various large pharma.

Ashley is a founding member of the Pistoia Alliance and director of the strategic IT portfolio for GlaxoSmithKline. As treasurer, Ashley provides financial oversight to the Alliance. He is also an active contributor to Pistoia Alliance working groups. An accomplished discovery-centric scientific and information technology leader, Ashley has over 15 years comprehensive experience in pharma, specifically the application of IT to complex drug discovery workflows. Prior to joining GSK in 2000, Ashley directed discovery informatics at Cerebrus (now Vernalis) and served as an investigator in computational chemistry at SmithKline Beecham. He received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews.

Martyn is a founding member of the Pistoia Alliance and has served on both the operational team and the board of directors since 2009. He has been the Alliance Company Secretary since 2011. Martyn gained his PhD in chemistry from the Cardiff University, UK. He joined ICI’s IT department in 1987. A number of roles followed with Zeneca including team and project leader roles in discovery information. In 1999 he became global head of Discovery Information at AstraZeneca gaining experience in portfolio management, strategy development, and externalization in pharmaceutical R&D. Martyn left AstraZeneca in 2010 and now works as an independent consultant.