About Us
- Clara Christ (Clara.Christ@digidrug.net) is Head of Computational Molecular Design Berlin at Bayer AG where her team focuses on discovering the next wave of oncology and gynecological therapies. She has worked as a computational chemist at Bayer AG since 2013 focusing on drug design in the therapy area oncology. Besides giving computational chemistry support in all stages of research projects she has been working on improved methods in the areas of de novo design, structure property analysis, and binding affinity prediction. She holds a Diploma (2005) and Doctorate (2009) degree in chemistry from ETH Zürich. During her doctoral studies with Wilfred van Gunsteren she has developed a method to calculate multiple free energy differences from a single simulation.
- Andrea Volkamer (Andrea.Volkamer@digidrug.net) is an assistant professor in structural bioinformatics and in silico toxicology at the Institute of Physiology, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin (since 2016). After earning her PhD from the University of Hamburg (2013), with focus on computational active site and druggability predictions, she worked at BioMedX Innovation Center, Heidelberg, as a PostDoc researcher on tools to assist the development of selective kinase inhibitors in collaboration with Merck KGaA (2013-2016). Andrea's main research focus is method development and application at the interface of structural bioinformatics and cheminformatics, with particular interest in structure-enabled machine learning approaches, applied in the context of computational drug design and in silico toxicology.
-
Gerhard Wolber (Gerhard.Wolber@digidrug.net) is professor for Pharmaceutical Chemistry and head of the molecular design group at the Institute of Pharmacy at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2010. After his studies of pharmacy at the University of Innsbruck and Computer Science at the Technical University of Vienna, he received his PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Innsbruck. In 2003 he co-founded the molecular modeling software company Inte:Ligand. In 2008 he changed back to academia as assistant professor at the University of Innsbruck before changing to the Freie Universität Berlin in 2010. His lab bridges algorithmic design and applied computational drug discovery to develop quantitative models for the effects of small molecules on macromolecules and cellular pathways. To achieve this, the group uses a combination of biophysical in vitro methods with statistical molecular mechanics and heuristically derived interaction patterns (3D pharmacophores, dynophores).
.
- Andreas Bender (Andreas.Bender@digidrug.net) is a Director for Digital Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as a Reader for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge/MA, the Leiden/Amsterdam Centre for Drug Research at Leiden University, as well as AstraZeneca in Cambridge/UK before his current post.