Dr. Pedro Hermkens (General coordinator)

Pedro Hermkens (PhD) has a scientific background in organic chemistry, pharmacology and biochemistry. He worked at Organon, Schering-Plough and MSD (Merck) in the Medicinal Chemistry Department for 21 years were he was responsible for projects in several therapeutic areas as team leader.

Furthermore, he has experience in the early stage of the process as Discovery Leader. In this role he was responsible for managing target identification & validation, assay development, screening & hit identification & optimization. The last few years he was section head Lead Optimization (Director Medicinal Chemistry) managing 3-4 project teams in parallel from lead to development candidate in different therapeutic areas; immunology, oncology and women’s health. He has experience in many different target families such as nuclear receptors, kinases, proteases and GPCRs. During his career he was heavily involved in combinatorial chemistry, automation of chemistry and library design. Also he was responsible for setting up an external network of CRO’s allowing to do virtual research with in- house projects.

On 1 February 2008 he was appointed as extraordinary professor Medicinal Chemistry at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In this position is providing training in medicinal chemistry to bachelor and master students, building bridges to the Medical Center by identifying common grounds for projects and is providing support to the synthetic Organic Chemistry group of Prof. Floris Rutjes. In 2013 he became director of the Institute Applied BioSciences & Chemistry of the HAN University of Applied Sciences. In this position he was responsible for education and research of this institute.

In 2020 he accepted the position of lector Drug Discovery at the HAN University of Applied Sciences.