Scientific Director – Virtual Screening Applications Expert

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is $171,000 - $275,000.

The Discovery Chemistry Research and Technologies (DCRT) organization is focused on the creation and discovery of new molecules to engage disease-relevant biological systems in order to test clinical hypotheses and advance innovative medicines. To accelerate the delivery of unique and valuable medicines for patients while making the best use of DCRT’s research investment, innovative use of computational tools will play an ever more integral role.

Reporting to the Associate Vice President, DCRT Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics, the Virtual Screening Applications Expert will be accountable for small molecule virtual screening activities at DCRT. In particular, the successful candidate will collaborate across the computational, structural biology, molecular pharmacology, and medicinal chemistry teams throughout the DCRT and beyond to continuously drive the successful application of transformative virtual screening approaches to bolster Lilly's ability to prosecute difficult to drug targets.

We are looking for:
An internationally recognized Virtual Screening (VS) expert (Director/Senior Director/Executive Director ) to lead the platform within a matrix organization. You will be highly collaborative and engage with new target and existing therapeutic project teams to ensure VS is judiciously leveraged to rapidly identify highly attractive small molecule starting points to enable Hit-ID and back-up discovery efforts across the Lilly enterprise. We seek a visionary scientific leader who will work with Lilly IT partners to pioneer the introduction of transformative methods into the platform and keep pushing the realms of VS to deliver a capability that will be unrivalled throughout the pharma industry.

Other unique characteristics and attributes we are looking for include:

• strategic and transformational thinking, with a high degree of self-awareness

• focused on the future and not on precedent or historical experiences

• aptitude for building interdisciplinary bridges and developing inclusive teams

• open, transparent and able to communicate effectively with employees, team members and cross-functional and/or senior leadership

• operates through collaboration across teams, functions, departments and sites

• proactive in establishing and driving internal and external collaborations

Here is what you are signing up for:

• Lead the matrix team to extend Lilly’s lead in key therapeutic areas by identifying novel and highly desirable chemical starting points to support new and multigenerational drug discovery efforts across a range of MoAs

• Work with structural biologists and expert modelers at Lilly to maximally leverage available structural and biophysical data to ensure targets, and conformations thereof, are well prepared to fully realize the aims of the VS campaigns

• Deliver workflows that judiciously leverage physics- and AI-based modelling methods to enrich virtual screening true positive hit rates across hard-to-drug targets

• Champion and implement cutting edge methods, e.g. leveraging ensemble or AI virtual screening techniques etc

• Develop and implement cheminformatics tools to ensure hits are selected for purchase that maximally cover chemical and binding pocket feature space to maximize hypotheses exploration

• Work alongside medicinal chemists to further triage emerging VS hits for synthesis/purchase

• Streamline VS workflows in collaboration with to ensure: the timely impact of VS campaigns; and increased adoption by other users to impact the broader portfolio.

• Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry, Computational Medicinal Chemistry or related field

• 5+ years’ track record of successfully applying VS technologies to drive drug discovery programs towards candidate identification and beyond

• Demonstrated ability to effectively champion new technologies culminating in successful applications thereof

• Demonstrated ability to inspire and lead scientists to work across teams, functions, departments and sites to achieve aspirational goals that accelerate portfolio deliveries.

• Excellent interpersonal skills and demonstrated advocacy of Diversity & Inclusion principles

• Passionate about coaching & developing others

• Extensive expertise with molecular design software tools

• Familiarity with the fundamental concepts of medicinal chemistry and ADME

• Authorship on peer-reviewed publications and/or inventorship on patents/patent applications

• Expertise in GPCR drug discovery

• Some domestic and international travel is anticipated.