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CTO

Damian Young, Ph.D

Damian W. Young, Ph.D. is Associate Director for the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor College of Medicine and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology and Pathology and Immunology. His research is focused on applying modern synthetic organic chemistry to constructing collections of biologically active small molecules for drug discovery. He has applied concepts related to generating molecular diversity within small molecules for modulating a variety of disease-associated protein targets. His lab was among the first to apply the principles of diversity generation to fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) and DNA-Encoded Library (DEL) platforms.

Dr. Young received a B.S. in chemistry from Howard University and then worked as a process chemist at Trimeris Inc. on the HIV drug enfuvirtide. He received a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry under the direction of Prof. Daniel Comins at North Carolina State University and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies in the lab of Prof. Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to joining Baylor, he was Group Leader within the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Project Leader for the Harvard/Broad Centers of Excellence in Methodology and Library Development (CMLD).