Dr. Corinne E. Augelli-Szafran has more than 35 years of drug discovery and leadership experience in pharma, academia and not-for-profit organizations. She received her BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania and her MS and PhD in Organic Chemistry from New York University. After 17 years at Parke-Davis/Pfizer, where she held a number of leadership roles mainly in the neurodegenerative field of study, she spent 8 years at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she built a drug discovery laboratory from ground zero with a focus on novel Alzheimer disease therapies. Currently, her responsibilities in her role as Vice President of Scientific Platforms, the Drug Discovery division at Southern Research, include the leadership and management of synthetic, medicinal and bioanalytical chemistry; high-throughput screening, oncology and structural biology; and computer-aided drug design. Some of the current key research programs that involve her strategic oversight include new therapies for cystic fibrosis, antivirals, oncology, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dermatology, and kidney disease. She is an affiliated professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; a faculty member in the Department of Clinical and Diagnostic Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, School of Public Health; a member of the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center; and a member of the Gregory Fleming James Cystic Fibrosis Research Center.
Dr. Sixue Zhang has more than 10 years of experience in computer-aided drug discovery. He obtained a Ph.D. in computational chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Since joining Southern Research, he has collaborated with more than 20 multidisciplinary teams from both academia and industry for more than 50 drug discovery projects covering oncology, neurology, infectious diseases, and other therapeutic areas. His team is part of Southern Research’s integrated Design–Make–Test–Analyze drug discovery platform. His team leverages the latest artificial intelligence and next-generation molecular modeling technology to facilitate drug discovery pipelines from therapeutic target discovery all the way to the clinical stage. For example, aided by AI models developed with vast in-house assay data, his team quickly discovered highly potent novel antiviral inhibitors that otherwise would take years to discover.
Dr. Rebecca J. Boohaker is the study director for the oncology department at Southern Research. She designs, oversees, executes and interprets all cancer-related in vivo studies to evaluate potential cancer treatments, including cancer-fighting viruses and other agents that might help combat the disease. Trained primarily as a molecular biologist, her graduate work at the University of Central Florida resulted in a targeted peptide therapy to combat triple-negative breast cancer. Since joining Southern Research, her recent work has focused on chemo-resistant colorectal cancers, as well as pancreatic cancers, which are aggressive and highly resistant to treatment. She received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a doctorate in biomedical sciences from the University of Central Florida. Her postdoctoral work at Southern Research focused on cancer biology and DNA damage repair.
