Ian Storer, Ph.D.

Dr Ian Storer is currently Vice President, Head of Hit Discovery in Global Research and Development at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals in the UK, an interdisciplinary department comprising medicinal chemistry and screening capabilities, including high throughput screening (HTS), DNA-encoded libraries (DEL), fragment based lead generation (FBLG) and virtual screening that is engaged in a wide range of projects across all company therapy areas. Prior to joining AstraZeneca in 2016, Dr Storer spent 10 years at Pfizer as a medicinal chemist and pre-clinical project leader supporting hit to candidate projects across many target classes in several disease areas, leading to multiple clinical stage assets. Before entering the pharmaceutical industry, he earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge with Professor Steven V. Ley working on new reagents and methods for natural product total synthesis. This was followed by postdoctoral research at Caltech working with Professor Sir David W. C. MacMillan on the development of new methods for enantioselective organocatalysis. Recently Dr Storer has led the establishment of a targeted protein degradation platform across AstraZeneca R&D to support discovery of PROTACs and molecular glue degraders.  He also maintains active research interests across many aspects of drug discovery, medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.