Paul Brennan

Paul Brennan received his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley under the mentorship of Paul Bartlett, working on synthetic methodology for combinatorial chemistry and synthesizing inhibitors for new anti-bacterial targets. Following three years of post-doctoral research with Steve Ley in Cambridge University on the total synthesis of rapamycin, Paul returned to California to take a position at Amgen. His research was focussed on designing and synthesizing kinase inhibitors for oncology. After two years at Amgen, Paul accepted a position as medicinal chemistry design lead at the world-renowned Pfizer labs in Sandwich, UK. Over the next six years, Paul designed and synthesized compounds for most major drug classes: GPCRs, CNS-targets, ion-channels and metabolic enzymes. In 2011, Paul joined the SGC as a principal investigator to discover chemical probes for epigenetic proteins. He is currently an associate professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the SGC and head of chemistry of the Alzheimer’s Research UK Oxford Drug Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford.