Wendy Cornell           

IBM Roles

Wendy's primary role is IBM Research Strategy Lead for Molecular Drug Discovery Technologies where she leverages her broad experience base in pharmaceutical industry use cases and existing solutions to guide efforts across the IBM Research Labs to develop innovative drug discovery capabilities. At the local level, Wendy serves as Manager of the Yorktown Heights-based Drug Discovery Technologies team, leading a group of simulation and AI experts in the development of next-generation tools to support small molecule and biologicdesign by exploiting protein structure and dynamic information. Wendy is credentialed as an IBM Q Ambassador for quantum computing and previously served as Life Science Research liaison to Watson Health.

Wendy joined IBM in 2016 after twenty years in the pharmaceutical industry where she led teams at Merck and Novartis in the development and application of chemistry modeling, cheminformatics, machine learning, text mining, and knowledge management solutions to support science-based pipeline decisions for lead finding and optimization, target assessment, preclinical safety, and preclinical competitive intelligence.

Pharmaceutical Industry Experience

During her time in the pharmaceutical industry, Wendy recruited and led science and solutions groups located in the Research, Licensing, and IT organizations:

As Director of Knowledge Discovery and Management at Merck (2011-2015) her competitive intelligence (CI) team developed NLP-based text mining solutions to support preclinical CI and Licensing using content from Medline abstracts, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH Reporter, patents, conference abstracts, other external sources, and proprietary content. Teams supporting proprietary document management extracted conclusions from internal preclinical safety assessment study reports to correlate short term and long term results and identify capability gaps and also protected, integrated, and exposed at-risk legacy paper files.

As Director of Chemistry Modeling and Informatics at Merck (2004-2010), her group supported drug discovery projects in the four therapeutic areas present at Rahway, Merck’s then largest research site, using similarity methods, QSAR, docking, molecular dynamics, and other approaches to identify new leads, maximize on-target potency, and minimize off-target effects.  She managed teams that developed novel solutions to assess target bindability and kinase selectability by integrating 3D protein structure, protein sequence, and activity data.  

At Merck Wendy also served on the New Technologies Review and Licensing Committee as chair of the Chemistry working group and member of the IT working group, identifying internal capability gaps and evaluating and integrating external solutions.  Her group initiated the first major collaboration between Modeling and Process Chemistry to establish vibrational CD capabilities which led to an ongoing and greatly expanded engagement.

 Professional Service

A Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Dr. Cornell has held multiple leadership roles in ACS governance, most recently serving as Chair of the Committee on Chemical Abstracts Service (CCAS), connecting ACS members with CAS, an ACS division which provides chemical information and has $1B in assets and $500M in annual revenues. She is past Program Chair and past Chair of the Computers in Chemistry (COMP) technical division and currently serves as COMP Leadership Development Chair. She is also a member of the SAB for the Stony Brook University Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB&DD). A former adjunct faculty member at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Dr. Cornell served as primary thesis advisor for a Ph.D. student. She has also served on multiple NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) panels.

 Education

Wendy received her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) working with the late Peter Kollman and resulting in a primary publication describing the AMBER classical force field which has received > 14,000 citations.  After UCSF she did a brief postdoctoral stint at European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Wendy received an MBA from Case Western Reserve University Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, OH on the Cleveland Clinic Healthcare track and enjoys studying the business impact of information technologies.