Professor Bissan Al-Lazikani

Bissan Al-Lazikani FRSB MBCS is a data scientist and drug discoverer with experience in academia and industry. She is Professor, Genomic Medicine; Director of Discovery Data Science and founding faculty of the Data Science Institute at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Prior to this, she was Head of Data Science at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. She is formally trained in biology and computer science:  BSc Molecular Biology from University College, London; MSc Computer Science from Imperial College, London; PhD Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge, and Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellowship Biophysics, Columbia University, NY. She co-led the creation of the groundbreaking ChEMBL database. Then she led the creation of the world’s largest public drug discovery knowledgebase, canSAR, integrating vast multidisciplinary data; and leading suite of AI-driven drug discovery analysis algorithms. She applies these to discovery novel drugs and optimize therapy for adult and pediatric cancers.