Karen Akinsanya

President of R&D, Therapeutics
Schrödinger

Karen Akinsanya joined Schrödinger in 2018. Karen leads the company’s therapeutics group which is responsible for preclinical drug discovery, translational research, and early clinical development, in addition to drug discovery business development and collaborations. She has more than 25 years of experience in academia, pharmaceutical R&D, partnerships, and licensing. Karen joined Merck Research Labs in 2005 and held positions of increasing responsibility in clinical pharmacology as a development team leader working on first-in-human studies through late-stage label studies before joining Discovery Preclinical & Early Development as a therapeutic area lead and then a search and evaluation lead in business development. Karen received her Ph.D. from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Imperial College in London, in endocrine physiology. After post-doctoral training at Imperial and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (UCL), Karen joined Ferring Pharmaceuticals in R&D working across sites in the UK and US. At Ferring, she led the discovery of a family of dipeptidyl peptidases related to DPPIV and pre-clinical characterization of FDA-approved FIRMAGON® for prostate cancer.