Dr Rob Young

Dr. Rob Young recently established his own medicinal chemistry consulting firm, Blue Burgundy, after a long and distinguished career with GSK at their UK R&D headquarters in Stevenage, where he was a Scientific Leader and elected GSK Fellow. Young’s early career charted significant contributions to six development candidates in antivirals (HIV/HBV/Herpes), iNOS and Factor Xa. He then moved to early-stage discovery, fulfilling leadership roles in numerous Hit-to-Lead programs, using diverse technologies including HTS, fragments, focused & designed screens and DNA-encoded libraries.  Substantive transnational programs also saw him involved with the GSK Diseases of the Developing World group in Spain, encompassing leadership of several Hit-to-Lead programs, plus mentoring and SAB roles. Expertise in Physical Properties and the Property Forecast Index were developed in a productive partnership with Alan Hill spanning may years, which was instrumental in setting new standards in drug discovery with chromatographic methods.  He was appointed to numerous GSK cross-disciplinary initiatives and communities including in silico predictive modelling, DMPK, Physical Chemistry, Stability and Safety. Young is author/inventor on 100 publications/ patent applications and an honorary visiting Professor, University of St Andrews. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford and completed his Post Doc at the Ben May Institute, University of Chicago.

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