Board Members

Phil Dawson is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA and Dean of the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Sciences. He received an A.B. (1992) in Chemistry from Washington University, and Ph.D. (1996) from Scripps Research under the guidance of Steve Kent. After pursuing postdoctoral work at Caltech, he returned to Scripps as an Assistant Professor. He has served as President of the American Peptide Society, the Board of Directors for FASEB and co-chaired the 22nd American Peptide Symposium and the 2016 GRC. He has published over 180 papers, and has been honored with an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship, the Vincent du Vigneaud Award, the Max Bergmann Kreis Gold Medal, the Zervas Award and the RSC MedImmune Protein and Peptide Science Award and the Akabori Memorial Award. Professor Dawson is a pioneer of chemoselective ligation methods for macromolecule synthesis and modification and has applied these tools broadly to better understand biological systems.

Mr. Robert A. Hagopian received his M.S. degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of California San Diego and his M.B.A from San Diego State University. His experience in peptide research and production spans over twenty five years which includes: Telios Pharmaceuticals (Manager, Peptide Production, 3 years) and NeoMPS, Inc. (Director, GMP Production 14 years). In his current position as Director of Business Development (13 years) at PolyPeptide Group, San Diego, Mr. Hagopian overseas the customer support activities for new and existing sales related to pre-clinical, clinical and commercial grade peptides.

Lutz Jermutus heads up a team of drug developers to advance new candidate medicines from pre-clinical to Ph3 clinical studies across modalities (biologics, nucleotides, cell therapies, small molecules) and indications (heart failure, kidney disease, liver disease, obesity, dyslipidaemia). Prior to moving to his current role in 2019 at AstraZeneca, he was Global Head, New Modalities, and then a Product Development Team Leader at MedImmune. There, he built new drug discovery platforms (peptides, proteins, phenotypic selections, bispecifics, ADCs) from which he advanced new leads into Ph1 first-in-human trials including a lipidated peptide, a phenotypically derived monoclonal antibody and a peptide-Ig fusion. Previously, Lutz was in increasingly senior protein engineering roles at Cambridge Antibody Technology, until its acquisition by AstraZeneca, and the Vitamins & Fine Chemicals division of Roche in Basel, Switzerland. His work has contributed to over 30 clinical drug candidates of which tralokinumab (atopic dermatitis) and moxetumumab pasudotox (HCL) have been approved. He is inventor of over 30 technology and product patents including for tralokinumab, oleclumab (Ph3 in NSCLC) and cotadutide (Ph3 in NASH). His over 80 publications (h-index of 36) continue to cover novel protein engineering approaches. Since 2013 Lutz has been an elected Industrial Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Lutz studied chemical engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany), majored in biotechnology at the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnologie de Strasbourg (ESBS, France) and obtained a PhD in biochemistry from Universität Zürich (Switzerland).

Dr. Cox is the Associate Director of Discovery Chemistry at the Novo Nordisk Research Center in Seattle, WA. He is leading the chemistry department to drive peptide, protein, and other therapeutic discovery efforts targeting chronic conditions including rare endocrine and blood disorders, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Prior to joining Novo Nordisk, he completed his training as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Stanford’s ChEM-H institute (2014-2016) under the mentorship of Prof. Chaitan Khosla and Dr. Mark Smith, serving as chemistry lead on numerous projects in early stage drug discovery. Dr. Cox received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Washington (2013) in the laboratory of Prof. Gojko Lalic, where he studied organic methodology and transition metal catalysis

Dr. Day is the President of Blue Gum Advisors LLC, a consulting firm focused on providing business development support to the life science industry.  She is a seasoned business development professional with more than 30 years of experience in the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries. Dr. Day has hands-on operational and executive management experience in the non-profit, for-profit and startup environments.

Most recently she was Senior Director of Business Development for Ferring  Pharmaceuticals.  Prior to that Dr. Day ran a successful consulting practice. She has previously served as Vice President of Business Development at what is now the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, Vice President of Business Development Conforma Therapeutics, Senior Director of Business Development at Molecumetics Ltd., Associate Director of Corporate Development at Ligand Pharmaceuticals. She was Ligand Pharmaceuticals’ first Project Manager, and began her biotechnology career at Invitrogen Corporation where she held various positions.

Dr. Day received her B.Sc., B.Sc. Honors, and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry from the University of Adelaide, Australia. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Southern California  and the La Jolla Cancer Research Center.

Dr. Zhu joined Ferring Research Institute in 2020, as head of discovery chemistry within an effort to expand Ferring drug discovery research to broad modalities. From 2012-2020, Dr. Zhu was the head of medicinal chemistry at UCB (UK) responsible for all NCE projects at the UK site. While at Merck Research Laboratories (MRL) he was a member of the Target Validation and Lead Identification teams, the Anti-Infectious Franchise Research License Committee and the Design and Acquisition Team. At Schering Plough Research Institute (SPRI) he established and led the Global (compound) Library Evaluation Team, responsible for strategy, criteria of Schering compound collection and enhancement of compound file performance. He also co-led the Global Compound Acquisition Team (GCAT), served in the Hit-to-Lead, Privileged Structure Working Groups and the g-Secretase Modulator Early Development team.

Dr. Johnny Zhu obtained post-doctoral training (Columbia U.) and holds a Ph. D. (U. of Wisconsin-Madison), a MS and a BS (Beijing Normal U.) in organic chemistry and he is an inventor/co-inventor of over 30 granted US patents, over 60 patent applications and has published over 35 scientific articles. He has also presented at many scientific conferences.

Stefan Schunk is Senior Director of Medicinal & Computational Chemistry at Zealand Pharma in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is leading the joint department to drive design and discovery of innovative peptide-based medicines, mainly focusing on metabolic and gastrointestinal diseases.

Prior to Zealand he spent 15 years at Grünenthal, a German specialty pharma, working in the fields of pain and inflammation. Here he served in various roles across research and early development – as External Innovation Lead scouting, evaluating, and in-licensing multiple research collaborations, as International Project Lead and heading the Medicinal Chemistry department. He started his Biotech career at Analyticon Discovery.

He performed postdoctoral work with Prof. Kocienski at Leeds University, UK in the field of natural product synthesis and received his Ph.D. in chemistry working for Prof. Enders at RWTH Aachen, Germany in the field of solid phase synthesis.

Dr. Adam Mezo has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over 20 years with a focus on the discovery of novel peptide, small molecule and protein therapeutics.

Dr. Adam Mezo is currently Executive Scientific Director, Discovery Biology Research at Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc in San Diego. In his current role at Neurocrine, he is focused on the discovery of novel peptide therapeutics for a range of unmet medical needs. Prior to this role, he led teams of chemists, biochemists and drug hunters at the Ferring Research Institute, Eli Lilly, Biogen Idec and Syntonix. He has worked in various therapeutics areas, including diabetes, hemophilia, immunology and reproductive and women’s health. Although peptides are his focus, he has also led teams in other modalities including small molecules and proteins as projects and priorities dictate. Dr. Mezo has over 50 published manuscripts and conference presentations, along with over 20 issued US patents. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Queen’s University (Canada), PhD from the University of British Columbia in organic chemistry, and performed postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of bioorganic chemistry.