Our team

The Institute is made up of dedicated drug discovery teams led by a Chief Scientific Officer and two Lead Academic Scientists.

Dr Emma Mead

Interim Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Biology

Emma received her PhD in Neuroscience from University College London, investigating the role of reactive oxygen species in modulating neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s disease. Following a post-doctoral research position at Cardiff University, where she studied the mechanism of action of naturally occurring anti-inflammatory compounds, Emma joined Eli Lilly as a senior scientist and team co-ordinator. Emma worked in target validation and early drug discovery for neurodegeneration, and established an in vitro neuroinflammation assay platform. Emma now leads the neuroinflammation team at the ODDI, who utilise human iPSC macrophage and primary microglial cultures for target validation, and develop cell-based screening assays for progression of neuroinflammatory projects.

Dr Emma Murphy

Team Leader

Emma received her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Leicester where she studied the function and mechanism of heme peroxidases and the engineered introduction of novel catalytic activities. Emma continued working on biophysical characterisation of peroxidases as a postdoctoral researcher at University College London before moving to the University of Colorado. Here Emma used a combination of high-throughput in silico and medium-throughput biophysical screening to discover novel compounds that bind to and disrupt the normal functioning of mosquito odorant binding proteins. Emma joined the ODDI in 2015 as an assay development and screening scientist and since 2018 Emma has led the assay development and screening team who develop and run biochemical and biophysical high-throughput screening assays. The team aims to identify chemical matter as tool compounds to validate novel neurodegeneration targets and as potential leads for therapeutic intervention.

Dr Margarida (Guida) Ruas

Team leader

Margarida received her PhD from Imperial College London, for her work on cancer research at the CRUK LIF Institute, and she pursued her interest in cancer research by taking a post-doctoral research position at the John Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge. Since 2002, her research work on fundamental aspects of endolysosomal biology, has led to the

development of molecular tools, cellular assays and animal models to better understand the role of lysosomes as signalling hubs. She held a Todd Bird Junior Research Fellowship in Biochemistry at New College Oxford. Margarida joined the ODDI to set up and lead the Organelle Biology team aiming to validate targets for therapeutic intervention and develop early drug discovery projects to correct organelle dysfunction that contribute to neurodegenerative phenotypes.

Dr Katherine England

Team leader

Katherine holds a D.Phil. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Oxford for her work on inhibitors of epigenetic proteins. She has worked in drug discovery across a variety of disease areas and drug classes in industry and academia and has been a member of the medicinal chemistry team at the ODDI since 2015. Katherine is a team leader in the medicinal chemistry group contributing to a range of projects in the ODDI portfolio.

Dr Tryfon Zarganis-Tzitzikas

Team leader

Tryfon Zarganis-Tzitzikas obtained his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2010 and his M.Sc., summa cum laude, in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in 2012 at the same university. In 2017, he obtained his Ph.D., cum laude, in Medicinal Chemistry under the guidance of Prof. Alexander Dömling in the group of Drug Design at the University of Groningen. His thesis focused on Innovative Multicomponent Reactions and their Use in Medicinal Chemistry.

After obtaining his Ph.D., Tryfon joined Symeres B.V. as a medicinal chemist working on immuno-oncology projects. From 2014 till 2022, he was the CSO of TelesisPharma B.V., a company focused on exploring novel synthetic routes to APIs using multicomponent reactions. In 2018, he joined Prof. Paul Brennan’s group at the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute at the University of Oxford (UK), currently he holds the position of team leader - senior postdoctoral scientist focusing on dementia targets, funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK.

Professor John Davis

DDA Business Development Manager

John Davis is Professor of Pharmaceutical Discovery in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, and a principal investigator within the Centre for Medicines Discovery. As director of business development for the Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Alliance (ARUK DDA), John is focused on building initiatives that enable and combine the strengths of the three drug discovery institutes within the ARUK DDA.

John is a biochemist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, postdoctoral training carried out at the Ludwig Institute (Middlesex Branch) and an EMBO fellowship at The Salk Institute. In 1993 he joined SmithKline Beecham as part of the establishment of a neurology research unit and, following the merger to form GlaxoSmithKline, led non-clinical pharmacology research departments for pain and neurodegenerative diseases. In 2010 John co-founded Convergence Pharmaceuticals, subsequently acquired by Biogen, and has since co-founded a further three start-up companies. In 2015 he joined the University of Oxford to set up and lead the ARUK Oxford Drug Discovery Institute. The institute has developed a portfolio of early drug discovery programmes for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, with an emphasis on genetically validated targets, and has forged multiple industrial alliances to ensure progression of these projects. John has 25+ years of drug discovery expertise from gene to phase IIa and has helped steer a dozen drug candidates into development.

Lead Academic Scientists

Our Lead Academic Scientists act as ambassadors for the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute, facilitating interactions with scientists and access to resources within the University of Oxford and beyond.

Professor Chas Bountra

Chas is Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford; Professor of Translational Medicine, and Head of Impact and Innovation in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine; Director, Oxford University Innovations; Professorial Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. Prior to coming back to Oxford in 2008, Chas was Vice President and Head of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline. Chas is an invited expert on several government and charitable research funding bodies, and an advisor for many academic, biotech and pharma drug discovery programmes. In 2012 he was voted one of the “top innovators in the industry”, in 2014 received the “Rita and John Cornforth Award” from the Royal Society of Chemistry, in 2017 and 2018 was voted “Master of the Bench” from the Medicine Maker Power List, and in 2018 was awarded the “Order of the British Empire” in the New Year’s Honours List.

Professor Paul Brennan

Professor Paul Brennan is a Lead Academic Scientist and former Chief Scientific Officer of the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute (ODDI) at the University of Oxford. He joined the ODDI as the Head of Chemistry in 2015. As a highly accomplished medicinal chemist with particular expertise in early drug discovery, he has been instrumental in developing and leading the Institute’s diverse portfolio of drug discovery projects.
Paul received his PhD in organic chemistry from UC Berkeley working on combinatorial chemistry and antibiotics. Following post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge on total synthesis, Paul returned to California to take a position at Amgen. His research was focussed on kinase inhibitors for oncology. After two years at Amgen, Paul moved to Pfizer in Sandwich, UK and, in 2011, joined the Structural Genomics Consortium as Professor of Medicinal Chemistry to discover chemical probes for epigenetic proteins.