The major focus of the Lindsley laboratory is drug discovery and medicinal chemistry. Students in my lab will collaborate with other members of the Pharmacology, Drug Metabolism and Clinical Pharmacology departments to pursue small molecule hits from high throughput screens, perform lead optimization studies to develop structure-activity-relationships (SAR) and ultimately deliver small molecules with acceptable properties to validate novel targets/mechanisms in in vivo animal models of target diseases.

After receiving her undergraduate Chemistry degree (Cornell University) and Ph.D. degree (University of Pennsylvania, Chemistry), Donna M. Huryn began her career as a medicinal chemist in the pharmaceutical industry (Hoffmann-La Roche & Wyeth Research), and contributed to drug discovery efforts for HIV, cancer, asthma, and CNS disorders with increasing levels of responsibility.

Peng Zhan is now working as a full professor in Shandong University. His research interests involve the discovery of novel antiviral, anticancer, and neurodegenerative diseases-related agents based on rational drug design and combinatorial chemistry approaches.

Philipp TSVETKOV holds PhDs in Molecular Biology (Aix-Marseille Université, France) and in Physics & Mathematics (Moscow, Russia). He specializes in protein–metal and protein–drug interactions studied with biophysical methods. At the Institute of Neurophysiopathology (Aix-Marseille Université), his research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and zinc signaling. He also run the Biophysical Instrumental Platform, where he directs the development of new approaches in cancer diagnostics and anticancer drug discovery. He is the author of 70+ publications and an inventor on several patents.

György obtained his Ph.D. at Budapest, Hungary and joined Sanofi heading a chemistry research lab. He moved to Gedeon Richter in 1999 as the Head of Computer-aided Drug Discovery. Since 2007 he was appointed as the Head of Discovery Chemistry at Gedeon Richter. He contributed to the discovery of the antipsychotic Vraylar® (cariprazine) that has been approved and marketed from 2016 in US and EU. He served as a director general of the Research Centre for Natural Sciences (RCNS) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 2015 he is heading the Medicinal Chemistry Research Group at RCNS. More recently György has been appointed as the Head of the National Drug Discovery and Development Laboratory. He has published over 340 papers and more than 10 books and book chapters. György was awarded by the prestigious Overton and Meyer Award of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry. He has been elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, as member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea.

​Bahne Stechmann is a cell biologist by training and worked in academia and biotechnology. His PhD work led to the discovery of the first small molecules that show efficacy against ricin in animal experiments (Stechmann et al., Cell 2010). Bahne is the Deputy Director at EU-OPENSCREEN, a multinational research infrastructure initiative which supports collaborative projects in Chemical Biology and early Drug Discovery. He is the coordinator is the EU-funded "RAFIKI" project, which aims to strengthening capacity for drug discovery and development across sub-Saharan Africa and to build new avenues for cooperation between African and European researchers, and coordinator of the "IMPULSE" project to expand EU-OPENSCREEN as an international collaborative initiative for chemical biology and early drug discovery.