Emiliem Scientific Advisory Board

Bahija Jallal, Ph.D.  Bahija Jallal is Vice President, Translational Sciences at MedImmune, Inc. where she leads the preclinical and clinical biomarker functions and also directs the toxicology/pathology, clinical assays and in vivo/ex vivo biology efforts. Previously she was Vice President of Translational Sciences and Translational Medicine at Chiron Corporation.  Prior to Chiron, Dr. Jallal worked at Sugen, Inc. where she held positions of increasing responsibility in cancer target discovery, signal transduction, and kinase biology.  Dr. Jallal received a master's degree in biology from the Universite de Paris VII in France, and her doctorate in physiology from the University of Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris. She conducted her postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.

Manoj C. Desai, Ph.D.  Manoj Desai has been Vice President, Medicinal Chemistry at Gilead Sciences since 2003. Previously he was Divisional Vice President of Research at Chiron from 1994 to 2003, where he was functional head of chemistry.  His areas of leadership have included medicinal chemistry, chemical informatics, computational chemisty, protein X-ray crystallography, combinatorial chemistry, analytical chemistry and bioorganic chemistry.  Prior to Chiron, he was a medicinal chemist for seven years at Pfizer Central Research.  He received his Ph.D. from M.S. University of Baroda in Natural Products with Dr. Sukh Dev.  Dr. Desai was a Post Doctoral Fellow in the laboratories of Professor Herbert C. Brown and Professor E.J. Corey.  He is a section editor for Annual Report in Medicinal Chemistry and Current Opinion in Drug Discovery and Development.

Sean Ekins, Ph.D., D.Sc.  Sean Ekins is Senior Vice President of Computational Biology at Arnold Consultancy and Technology LLC, where he consults for several companies in the areas of computational drug discovery, systems biology applied to pathway and biomarker discovery, and in vitro and computational ADME/Tox.  Previously he was Vice President of Computational Biology at GeneGo where he developed MetaDrug, a software product for drug metabolism and toxicity assessment widely used in the pharmaceutical industry.  Prior to GeneGo, he was Associate Director of Computational Drug Discovery at Concurrent Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (now Vitae Pharmaceuticals) and a senior scientist in drug disposition at Lilly Research Laboratories and Pfizer.  Dr. Ekins received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Aberdeen and was recently awarded a D.Sc. in science from the University of Aberdeen.  After his Ph.D., he completed postdoctoral studies at Lilly Research Laboratories in Drug Disposition where he applied in vitro and computational pharmacophore methods to cytochrome P450s.  He is an Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Pharmacy Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Maryland and is editor of the book "Computer Applications for Pharmaceutical Research and Development" for Wiley.  He is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods and on the Editorial Boards of Drug Metabolism and Disposition, Drug Discovery Today, and Pharmaceutical Research.