Prof Katherine Andrews
Principal Research Leader, Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics, Griffith University
Professor Katherine Andrews is a Principal Research Leader at the Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics at Griffith University and has more than 20 years’ experience in malaria drug discovery research. From 2019-2024, she was the Director of the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery and the head of Compounds Australia, Australia’s national compound storage and curation facility.
Katherine is Fellow of the Australian Society for Parasitology and Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Association of Alexander von Humboldt Fellows. She has received significant research funding over her career and several awards including an ARC Future Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, Queensland Premiers Award for Medical Research, Queensland Women in Technology Life Sciences Research Leader Award and Life Sciences Queensland Women of Influence Award. Katherine is a past Director of the Australian Society for Medical Research and past Executive Council member of the Australian Society for Parasitology.
Katherine is passionate about STEM engagement and promoting women in STEM. She is the founder and Director of the That’s RAD! Science project which aims to inspire young children though engaging STEM stories authored by leading women in STEM. To date, five books have been produced and >14,000 copies distributed to children, schools and libraries around Australia.
A/Prof Greg Arndt
Head, Drug Discovery Centre and THerapeutic INnovations for Kids (THINK), CCI
Associate Professor Greg Arndt is the Head of the ACRF Drug Discovery Centre, based within Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and Head of Drug Discovery for the THerapeutic INnovations for Kids (THINK) initiative, which is an end-to-end, target-to-patient, drug discovery and development capability focused on finding novel drug candidates for childhood diseases. Greg has also had recent roles as Group Leader within the Cancer Therapeutics Cooperative Research Centre and the Preclinical Drug Testing Core for the Zero Childhood Cancer Personalised Medicine Program. He is presently an Associate Professor (Conjoint) in the School of Women’s and Children’s Health as part of the Faculty of Medicine at UNSW.
Prior to joining CCI in 2009, Greg was Research Director of the Target Discovery Program at Johnson & Johnson Research, where he spent 16 years in increasingly senior roles, and established an integrative gene discovery platform for identifying new targets for drug discovery in asthma, cancer, and infectious diseases.
Greg’s research interests and expertise span target discovery and validation, development of novel technology platforms and high throughput small molecule screening, early-stage drug discovery (gene- and small molecule-based therapeutics), development of unique cell-based platforms for personalized medicine, and translation of novel biological discoveries into the clinic.
Dr Brian Dymock
Head of QEDDI, QEDDI, Uniquest
Brian Dymock leads the medicinal chemistry group at QEDDI working on small molecule preclinical drug discovery. Previously, Brian worked in discovery research and development in large pharmaceutical companies, biotech and academia.
He was Associate Professor in Medicinal Chemistry at the National University of Singapore and previously Head of Chemistry for S*BIO Pte Ltd in Singapore, where his team was responsible for the discovery of Pacritinib, Pracinostat, TG02, VS-5584 and two other clinical candidates.
Brian led the chemistry team at Vernalis which discovered Luminespib in collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Research. Brian was a Department Manager at Evotec and a Team Leader at Roche UK. He earned his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Glasgow.
Dr Tim Failes (Committee Chair)
Functional High Throughput Technologies Platform Lead, CCI
Tim Failes is the manager of the HTS Facility and leads the Functional High Throughput Technologies Enabling Platform at CCI, overseeing operations and advising internal and external research groups on HTS and high content screening methodologies and transitioning chemical hits to drug candidates. Tim has 25 years research experience across a broad area of bioinorganic and medicinal chemistry, and cancer cell biology and drug discovery. Prior to joining CCI in 2007 he completed his PhD in chemistry at the University of Sydney and undertook postdoctoral studies in industry collaborations for developing novel metal-based pharmaceuticals.
Dr Jeff Mitchell
Head, National Drug Discovery Centre, WEHI
Jeff Mitchell is the head of WEHI’s National Drug Discovery Centre (NDDC), which specialises in high-throughput screening to discover new compounds with potential to treat human disease. Jeff is an experienced medicinal chemist, with more than 20 years of expertise in small molecule drug discovery. Before joining WEHI, he was a Principal Research Scientist at Biota Pharmaceuticals, where he led chemistry programs focused on novel anti-infective drug development. He has specialised skills in the use of cheminformatics tools and computer programming to analyse and interpret chemical data. Jeff holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Melbourne.
Prof Sally-Ann Poulsen
Director, Compounds Australia and Principal Research Leader at the Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics, Griffith University
Prof Sally-Ann Poulsen is Professor of Chemistry and is a Principal Research Leader at the Institute for Biomedicine and Glycomics at Griffith University. Sally-Ann was appointed as a Fellow, Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) in 2017 and Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in 2023. She is past Chair of the RACI Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology Division and is a global council member of the International Chemical Biology Society. She is author of >100 publications in the field of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology and recipient of the $1M 2023 Ramaciotti Biomedical Research Award. Sally-Ann is also Director of Compounds Australia, Australia’s national infrastructure for compound management and logistics – housing >1.5 million small molecule compounds and supporting biomedical researchers nationally and internationally.
Dr Alan Robertson
Managing Director, Canthera Discovery
Dr. Alan Robertson has an extensive international career in new drug design and development and commercialisation of research. While working for Wellcome (now GSK) in the UK, Dr. Robertson invented the antimigraine drug, Zomig, and spearheaded its development into clinical trials.
Previously, Dr. Robertson was the inaugural CEO and Managing Director of Pharmaxis Ltd, responsible for the development to international approval of a new treatment for cystic fibrosis. In that role, he established a drug discovery capability within Pharmaxis that led to a number of important discoveries including a new drug for liver inflammation, that has been licensed to Boehringer Ingelheim.
Currently, Dr. Robertson is the Managing Director for Canthera Discovery, an oncology-focussed drug discovery organisation, and is the CEO and Managing Director of Alsonex, a clinical-stage company developing a new treatment for neurodegenerative diseases including Motor Neuron Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. He is also Chairman of GenieUs, a genomics-based company exploring new treatment options for motor neuron disease, and Chairman of AllVascular, a company developing a vascular access device for treating cancer.
Dr. Robertson serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Pharmaxis Limited, The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation, and the Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF) Drug Discovery Centre.
Dr Grant Stuchbury
Biology Team Leader, QEDDI, Uniquest
Grant is a biology team leader in the Queensland Emory Drug Discovery Initiative (QEDDI), following several years’ experience in early-stage drug discovery with Cancer Therapeutics (CTx). With a background in high-throughput screening and high-content imaging, he leads a biology team designing, developing and implementing robust, reliable and relevant in vitro and in vivo biological assays for the development of small molecule therapeutics and delivery of commercially attractive preclinical packages. Grant has drug discovery experience across a broad range of disease indications, including oncology, neurodegeneration, inflammation and epigenetic modification and has developed small molecules for multiple target classes in these disease areas.