US Lead, AI for Discovery Chemistry (AI4D)

Job Description Summary

Novartis is seeking an experienced medicinal chemist to lead our AI for Discovery Chemistry (AI4D) team for the US, located in Cambridge Massachusetts. The role is centered within our Global Discovery Chemistry (GDC) group in close partnership with a matrix of Computer Assisted Drug Discovery (CADD) scientists and multi-disciplinary drug discovery project teams. This is an opportunity to be at the forefront of shaping, scaling and implementing our AI/ML-driven evolution of medicinal chemistry. We seek candidates with a strong track record across the drug discovery process, from hit evaluation to candidate selection, coupled with passion and experience in the integration of AI/ML methods and digital workflows into medicinal chemistry projects. Excellent communications, influencing and stakeholder management skills are essential.

 

Job Description

Internal Position Title:  Director

Position location:  Cambridge, MA, onsite

About the Role:

Novartis is seeking an experienced medicinal chemist to lead our AI for Discovery Chemistry (AI4D) team for the US, located in Cambridge Massachusetts. The role is centered within our Global Discovery Chemistry (GDC) group in close partnership with a matrix of Computer Assisted Drug Discovery (CADD) scientists and multi-disciplinary drug discovery project teams. This is an opportunity to be at the forefront of shaping, scaling and implementing our AI/ML-driven evolution of medicinal chemistry. We seek candidates with a strong track record across the drug discovery process, from hit evaluation to candidate selection, coupled with passion and experience in the integration of AI/ML methods and digital workflows into medicinal chemistry projects. Excellent communications, influencing and stakeholder management skills are essential.

Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:

- Shape our global digital strategy for medicinal chemistry together with your AI4D EU counterpart and CADD colleagues. With partners, accelerate drug discovery projects by implementation of data strategies, generative and predictive models and a compute-first approach.

- Lead and further build the AI4D team. Develop a larger matrix team of digital enablers.

- Together with partners, define broadly applicable key progress indicators to measure project progress and impact of AI/ML and identify additional opportunities for improvement.

- Lead and influence with a sense of urgency in a dynamic, matrixed environment to enable adoption of AI/ML and compute-first approaches in GDC.

- With the project teams and CADD leads, you will identify the key focus areas for projects, develop a data strategy and deploy AI/ML methodologies to generate and prioritize hypothesis to accelerate project timelines to development candidates. Develop an understanding of the US GDC portfolio to identify best opportunities for AI/ML enablement.

 - Partner with other departments such as pharmacokinetic, preclinical and discovery sciences, and other groups in GDC such as synthetic technology and parallel medicinal chemistry to implement novel models and approaches.

- Through strong interactions with specialists in all areas of Novartis, you will identify limitations with our current technologies, identify solutions internally and externally, championing them as necessary.

- Directly contribute to an AI/ML enabled project as a scientific leader and medicinal chemist

- Co-lead external collaborations to strengthen our internal capability.

- As one of the advocates of the AI/ML evolution, advocate for the potential of AI/ML methodologies in drug discovery, with concrete examples from our project portfolio and define/share best practices

Minimum requirements

• PhD in synthetic chemistry or related fields with 10+ years of post-graduate medicinal chemistry and 5+ years of AI-enabled small molecule discovery experience, or equivalent.

• Proficiency with data analysis and digital drug discovery tools - knowledge in AI/ML methods, cheminformatics, and predictive modeling is an advantage.

• Track record of innovation, efficient hypothesis generation and testing, and desire to tackle ambitious scientific problems.

• Excellent communication skills, ability to influence, and collaborative style to thrive in a highly dynamic and matrixed organization

• Track record of success in drug discovery. Example of impact through effective deployment of AI enabled idea generation (e.g. Generative Chemistry) and prioritization (digital workflow) in small molecule drug discovery projects would be a plus.

Why Novartis: Our purpose is to reimagine medicine to improve and extend people’s lives and our vision is to become the most valued and trusted medicines company in the