Kellen Women's Entrepreneurship Fund Speaker Series

Leigh Baxt has been an Associate Director of Biology at the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI) since 2018. The Tri-I TDI is a collaboration between Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, and biopharmaceutical partner Takeda. The mission of the TDI is to encourage researchers in the Tri-I community to advance groundbreaking biological discoveries to preclinical studies. In her role, Dr. Baxt provides strategic and technical guidance for steps ranging from target validation, assay selection and development to animal proof-of-concept studies.

A key contributor to multiple commercially licensed programs, Dr. Baxt has experience with strategic aspects of early small molecule drug discovery for a wide variety of disease areas and has worked on more than 30 early discovery programs.

Dr. Baxt received a B.A. in biology from Brown University and a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and was a research scientist at the Broad Institute.