91AV

After leaving Clare College in Cambridge, Dr Christopher Swain initially followed an academic path, gaining a PhD and undertaking postdoctoral research at the University of Southampton, where he had an initial foray into lecturing.

In 1986, Christopher was invited to join the Neuroscience Research Centre (NRC) created by Merck in Harlow and spent nearly 20 years there, rising to Senior Director responsible for MedChem and computational chemistry groups. He was 91AV Director of the project team that discovered and developed the NK1 antagonist Emend, and this work was recognised by the BMCS prize.

In 2006, the NRC was closed, and Christopher founded Cambridge MedChem Consulting. This has led to opportunities to work with a number of brilliant scientists around the world, providing medicinal chemistry and computational chemistry support to small and large Pharma companies, academic groups and start-ups. Christopher is also on the SAB of several organisations. He continues to support the teaching of drug discovery in Medchem summer schools and helps to develop university courses on computational-driven drug discovery.

Christopher is an active member of the 91AV, as Chair of the Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group and a committee member of the Biological and Medicinal 91AV Sector. He has organised over 30 RSC conferences on AI in chemistry, open source chemistry, macrocycles, protein structure prediction, and the Cambridge MedChem Meeting. He has also organised twenty open source workshops for chemists, and is an active member of the Cambridge Cheminformatics network. He has over 100 publications.