Alex G. Waterson

Alex G. Waterson, Ph.D. is currently a Research Professor of Pharmacology and Chemistry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Trained as a synthetic organic chemist, he completed his Ph.D. studies with Professor Al Padwa at Emory University and conducted postdoctoral research at Colorado State University in the group of the late Professor Albert I. Meyers. Alex joined a medicinal chemistry team at GlaxoSmithKline in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina in 2001, contributing to the discovery of covalently modifying ErbB inhibitors and the B-RAF drug Dabrafenib, among other projects. Upon transitioning to Vanderbilt in 2008, he helped establish Vanderbilt’s entry into the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium and joined Professor Fesik’s fragment-based drug discovery team as a medicinal chemistry and project leader. He also serves as Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry for the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology, collaborating with many groups to guide hit and lead optimization efforts toward probe and/or therapeutic discovery. He has led and participated in primarily oncology drug discovery projects, including those aimed at direct and indirect inhibition of K-RAS, as well protease, epigenetic, and cancer metabolism targets, and several recent projects in the Targeted Protein Degradation space.