MEEX Speaker
SCHLESSINGER Avner, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacological Sciences, Associate Director, Center for Therapeutics Discovery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY
Biography
Dr. Avner Schlessinger is an Assistant Professor of Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, an Associate Director of Mt. Sinai Center for Therapeutics Discovery, and Co-Director of the Pharmacology, Discovery and Therapeutics Training Area. The overall goal of Dr. Schlessinger’s lab is to improve and automate the structure-based drug discovery process by developing and applying computational methods, and to characterize disease pathways, with a long-term goal of developing drugs against novel targets. His lab publishes in the areas of chemical biology, bioinformatics, and drug discovery, as well as in personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics.
Dr. Schlessinger graduated from Tel Aviv University with a BSc in Biology and Chemistry, and completed his PhD from Columbia University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. As a PhD student, he developed programs predicting protein structure and function using various machine-learning approaches such as artificial neural networks. Following his graduate studies, Dr. Schlessinger was an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF, where he established methods for structure-based drug design and used these approaches to rationally design tool compounds for membrane proteins and protein kinases. Dr. Schlessinger serves on the editorial boards of PLOS Computational Biology and Journal of General Physiology. He is also an Advisory Board Member of the ReSolute Transporter Consortium as well as a Member of the International Transporter Consortium.
