Stephan C Schürer, PhD
Lead Chemoinformatics Scientist
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Therapeutics, The Scripps Research Institute, Florida
Dr. Stephan Schürer joined the Center for Computational Science in October 2008 leading the chemoinformatics program. He is Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the Miller School of Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Molecular Therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida.
His research is centered in computer-aided drug design, cheminformatics, translational drug informatics, and semantic integration with the goal to better synergize experimental and 'in-silico' approaches for the development of small molecule tool compounds and drug "leads". His laboratory develops and applies computational compound and protein target profiling for drug discovery, new ontologies and software for integration and analysis of diverse screening data sets, and cheminformatics infrastructure for large scale data analysis. Dr Schürer is also interested in developing novel cheminformatics approaches to address synthetic feasibility and synthetically accessible chemical space.
In his previous position at the Scripps Research Institute Florida, Dr. Schürer led the cheminformatics activities to develop an integrated screening and drug discovery informatics infrastructure, which is now routinely used to process and analyze large data sets from high-throughput screening and drug discovery projects. Dr. Schürer led the cheminformatics efforts at the Scripps Research Molecular Screening Center and the Columbia University Screening Center and was also chairman of the Informatics Working Group of the National Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network. Prior to joining Scripps, Dr. Schürer was Sr. Director at Eidogen-Sertanty, a developer of cheminformatics technology and scientific content products. In previous positions at Sertanty and Libraria Inc. he was responsible for the development of chemistry and SAR knowledge bases and headed the off-shore content operations. Various privately and government-funded research and development projects yielded commercial products that are now licensed to major pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies.
Stephan Schürer received his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from the Technical University of Berlin. He studied chemistry at Humboldt University-Berlin, Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry-Göttingen, and University of California Berkeley.
Dusica Vidović, PhD
Post Doctoral Associate
Dr. Dušica Vidović joined the CCS as a Post Doctoral Associate in September 2008. Before she joined CCS she had worked as a Research Associate at The Scripps Research Institute and The Computer-Chemistry Centrum in the field of chemoinformatics. Dr. Vidović has experience in HTS data analysis, structure-based and ligand-based drug design, homology modeling, docking and scoring, virtual screening, pharmacophore modeling, lead optimization, ADMET modeling, QSAR/QSPR prediction, physicochemical properties prediction, topological indices. She received her PhD degree in chemistry from the University of Kragujevac (Kragujevac, Serbia).
Robin Smith, PhD
Post Doctoral Associate
Dr. Robin Smith received his Ph.D. from the Neuroscience Program at the University of Miami. He will join the Center for Computational Science in November 2009 as a Post Doctoral Associate where he will be responsible for developing an ontological model for representing data from high content screens as part of collaboration between Drs. Stephan Schuerer and Vance Lemmon. Dr. Smith’s expertise is in the areas of gene expression analysis, genomics data mining and phenotypic cell-based screens. He has developed several software tools to analyze and compare biological data sets.
Bijul Lakshman Aniyarath, PhD
Non-enrolled Fellow
Dr. Bijul Lakshman Aniyarath is a Jawaharlal Nehru Fulbright Research Fellow in Professional and Doctoral Research, working along with Chemoinformatics group. He received his MSc and PhD in Agricultural Chemicals from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi, India. Dr. Aniyarath is experienced in conventional and microwave assisted organic synthesis (Organophosphorus and heterocyclis compounds), purification and characterization of chemical compounds and has working experience with NMR, IR, Mass, AAS, HPLC, GLC etc. Research interests include chemoinformatics, QSAR, organic synthesis, computer aided molecular designing, database management.