Ed Kuspiel
Chair, LRIG Mid Atlantic
Chapter Representative to Executive Board, LRIG Mid Atlantic

Zhengming (Jimmy) Chen, Ph. D.
Treasurer, LRIG Mid Atlantic
Committee, Computational Methods

Dr. Jimmy Chen is currently the President of ClickChem LLC, a management and consulting company specialized in pharmaceutical chemistry & biopharmaceutical investment. Previously he was Vice President of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Research & Development at DOV Pharmaceutical, Inc. with responsibilities for DOV's discovery chemistry, chemoinformatics, process development, API & drug substance manufacturing, and drug product packaging activities. Prior to joining DOV Pharmaceutical Inc.; he was a principal investigator at Purdue Pharma L.P. He has held key leadership positions in a number of discovery research programs at Purdue Pharma and has made major contributions to 2 development candidates for pain and CNS disorders. Earlier in his career, Dr. Chen and his co-workers at Organix, Inc. were involved in the research directed at the design and synthesis of ALTROPANE®, a phase III clinical diagnostic agent for Parkinson's disease. Dr. Chen has collaborated with Nobel Prize laureate Barry Sharpless at Coelacanth Corporation, and he was a major contributor for Coelacanth's clickchem (high throughput chemistry) strategies. Dr. Chen holds 11 issued US patents and 25 world wide patent applications. In 2003, his research was highlighted by the "Drug Discovery Today" magazine. In 2006, he was interviewed by Genetic Engineering News magazine on the topic of lead optimization. He was an invited participant in the Executive Dialogue Roundtable Discussion on Laboratory Productivity 2006 hosted by Advantage Business Media. He is a recipient of 2007 & 2008 New Jersey Science and Technology Fellowship Award. Dr. Chen has been an invited speaker for 15 international meetings focusing on drug discovery technologies, medicinal chemistry, pharmaceutical outsourcing and chem-informatics. He has chaired IBC's 2nd Annual Conference on "Optimization of High Quality Libraries" in 2006. He is an author or co-author of more than 80 papers, presentations and abstracts.

Specialties:

Pharmaceutical chemistry, chemoinformatics, process development, API & drug product manufacturing, drug product packaging, CMC regulatory, biopharmaceutical investment

tel:  (908) 740-7281
fax: (908) 740-7115
email: david.pechter@spcorp.com
 

Dave is a mechanical engineer in Schering-Plough's New Lead Discovery HTS group where he has been working on a range of mechanical and software projects from FLIPR support and Twister2 systems, to xml data formatting. He has been involved in lab automation since 1991, when he worked on the design and programming of a 15' gantry robot for HTS.

email: olsenk@mail.montclair.edu

tel:  609-252-5418
email: william.neil@lab-robotics.org

tel:  (732) 302-1038
fax: (732) 875-0270
email:

Andy is the Director of the REMP Business Unit of Tecan US Inc., which develops and produces devices, consumables, software and fully automated sample processing and storage systems mainly used in Research and Development by the world's leading pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies.

From September 2004 - October 2006, he provided services to the laboratory automation community through his consulting company, SmarterLab.

Andy was Founder, Board Director, and Executive Vice President (September 2001 – September 2004) at TekCel. TekCel provided automated compound management solutions to the drug discovery laboratory industry. He was previously Founder, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman of the Board at TekCel (September 1997 – September 2001).

He was Senior Field Application Consultant at Zymark Corporation, Hopkinton, Massachusetts (1989 – 1997), and Field Technical Specialist at Sybron Medical Products, Rochester, New York (1981 – 1989).

Andy is Executive Chair and Webmaster of the nonprofit Laboratory Robotics Interest Group. Since his involvement in April 1996 the group has grown from a regional membership of 200 to a global presence of over 9,000. He is a member of the Society for Biomolecular Screening, Mensa, International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was a Board Director and is a member of the nonprofit Association for Laboratory Automation.  He served on the Program Committee of the Microplate Technology and International Conference on Automation and Robotics (MipTec-ICAR).  He was an Officer of the American Chemical Society Laboratory Automation National Division (LABA). Andy is an editor of the Dmoz Open Directory Project for the categories of Laboratory Automation and Robotics; Laboratory Refrigeration and Cold Storage; and Pipettors, Automatic and Manual.  He has moderated scientific sessions at Miptec-ICAR, Laboratory Robotics Interest Group, and ScreenTech meetings. Andy holds three patents and has collaborated and assisted in several scientific papers.

In selecting the committee members, we considered prior involvement in the Mid Atlantic chapter, past meeting attendance, areas of expertise and their applicability to the group's needs, geography, willingness to share in the meeting and on-line discussions, as well as other factors. We also review the steering committee annually to insure active participation.

LRIG Mid Atlantic Steering Committee