Led a motivated team of medicinal and computational chemists in exploring lead generation opportunities. The objective is to develop hypotheses, convert them into designs through modeling and medicinal chemistry intuition and take the designs to bench. I find this a great opportunity to complement the conventional way of hit finding through HTS. The ideas we are currently exploiting are scaffold hop using shape and electrostatics of the lead, design of covalent inhibitors etc. We are successful in delivering back up options to advanced projects, creating novel chemical space for infection.

Led an interdisciplinary team of scientists from chemistry. This gave me an opportunity to work with scientists outside my area of expertise. I am very proud of this experienced, committed and high motivated team. This role enabled me to appreciate the innovation required in analytical chemistry and compound management team.

* Led a team of highly motivated and committed computational chemists and medicinal chemists with objective of delivering hits and leads for M. tuberculosis drug discovery.* Responsible for the lead generation portfolio of the organization.* Delivered multiple novel chemical series from High Throughput Screening (HTS), Virtual Screening (VS) and Fragment Based Lead Generation (FBLG) for target and whole cell based lead generation programs* Awarded the Wellcome Trust Grant for affortable healthcare in India entitled "Novel candidate drugs against M. tuberculosis: design, validate and optimise leads targeting NAD(P)(H) utilizing enzymes" (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Technology-transfer/Funded-projects/India/index.htm)* Extensive experience in judicious use of predictives sciences (calculated properties, ligand and target based modeling etc) to make decisions, designs and project progression for early and late stage discovery programs.* Experience in project management.* Experience in leading multi-discplinary teams and people development* Experience in writing Grants for drug discovery programs* Experience managing collaboration with academic and industrial partners

* Led the computational chemistry team for hit identification (HI), lead identification (LI) and lead optimization (LO) programs.* As a team we designed several knowledge based focussed libaries using 2D and 3D-modelling for HI programs. These smaller libraries have delivered multiple high quality hit series with optimal biochemical, micorbiological and chemistry efforts. The hits have progressed to advanced projects. * The high point of our team achievement is the design and development of a web based tool called 'HATZ'. The tool complies the HTS data and calculated physico-chemical properties, clustering information of compounds and presents to the project team in an organized and graphical way. It enabled the teams to evaluate the results from HTS, take informed decisions and track the follow up actions. The tool was widely used by scientists from chemistry, bioscience and DMPK. It has made tremendous impact in all of our HI programs.

Worked as a computational chemist for drug discovery programs.

Thermodynamics of DNA, ligand-DNA and protein-DNA complexes through molecular dynamics simulation using explicit and implicit solvent models

Design of chiral ligands for asymmetric reaction through transition state modeling using ab initio, DFT and semi-empirical methods