Kellen Women's Entrepreneurship Fund Speaker Series

Karen Akinsanya joined Schrödinger in 2018. She leads the Discovery Research & Development group with responsibility for preclinical drug discovery and translational research. Dr. Akinsanya has more than 25 years of experience in academia, pharmaceutical R&D, partnerships, and licensing. She 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.

Dr. Akinsanya 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), she joined Ferring Pharmaceuticals in R&D working across sites in the United Kingdom and the United States. At Ferring, Dr. Akinsanya led the discovery of a family of dipeptidyl peptidases related to DPPIV and pre-clinical characterization of FDA-approved FIRMAGON® for prostate cancer.