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M. Kevin Brown grew up in Chicago, USA. He received his undergradaute training at Hamilton College and his doctoral training at Boston College with Professor Amir H. Hoveyda during which time he was involved in the early stages of the development of sulfonate NHC-Cu complexes, completing the first total synthsis of clavirolide C. For his work as a graduate student, he was awarded fellowships by the American Chemical Society Organic Division. After receiving his doctoral degree, Brown joined the research group of Professor E. J. Corey at Harvard University as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. Since 2011, he has been a member of the chemistry faculty at Indiana University. Here, his independent research program has been directed toward the development of new methods and strategies in chemical synthesis with a special emphasis on alkene functionalization processes. He has received several awards such as the Novartis Early Career Award, CAREER award, Amgen Young Investigator Award, Sloan Fellowship, and a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. Most recently, he was named the James F. Jackson Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University.

Prof. Langer holds an M.S. degree in Pharmacy and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Vienna, Austria. He began his career at Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck in 1992 after completing a post doctoral fellowship at the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France with Prof. C.-G. Wermuth. In 1993, he established the Computer Aided Molecular Design Group at Innsbruck University. In 1997, he was appointed Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and served as Head of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry there in 1998 and 1999.

In 2003 he founded, together with two colleagues, the company Inte:Ligand GmbH, an Austrian based privately held software development and consulting organization, in which he served as CEO from 2003 to 2008.

In 2008, Prof. Langer was appointed CEO of Prestwick Chemical Inc., a world renown contract research organization specialized in medicinal chemistry services located in Strasbourg-Illkirch, France. Under his leadership, several drug discovery programs in different research target sectors successfully progressed into pre-clinical and clinical development.

In 2013, Prof. Langer was nominated Full Professor for Pharmaceutical Chemistry at University of Vienna, Austria, where since 2014 he also heads the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Faculty of Life Sciences. Since March 2021, he heads the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, which has been created by merging all departments related to pharmaceutical research at University of Vienna, with a headcount of more than 250.

His research interests range from medicinal chemistry, computer-assisted molecular design, to pharmacophore elucidation as well as machine learning based molecular modeling techniques.

His expertise and scientific work have culminated in more than 250 original articles, book chapters, and invited reviews (scholar.google.com: h-index 63, more than 12900 citations; Scopus: h-index 56, more than 9400 citations), several patents, and more than 300 lectures and poster presentations at scientific meetings.

Gerhard currently holds the CSO position at Anavo Therapeutics, a young biotech company focussing on allosteric phosphatase modulators. He has proven expertise in small-molecule drug discovery and strong entrepreneurial skills supported by 25 years of practical and managerial experience in the European pharmaceutical, transatlantic biotech, and CRO industries. Throughout his career, Gerhard has worked on a wide range of different target classes in numerous disease areas. Gerhard’s expert knowledge in drug discovery, specifically in medicinal chemistry allowed him to establish novel design and optimization paradigms, proven by over 80 peer-reviewed publications. Prior to founding Anavo, he co-founded Gotham Therapeutics in New York, and held key positions at Mercachem (today Symeres), GPC Biotech, Axxima Pharmaceuticals, Glaxo in Italy, Bayer AG in Germany, and Organon in the Netherlands. Gerhard received his PhD in organic chemistry from the Technical University of Munich, where he worked with Prof. Dr. Horst Kessler on anti-adhesive integrin antagonists.

Since more than 10 years, Gerhard is the organizer of the bi-annual Medicinal Chemistry Course in Leysin, held by the swiss chemical society.