Romualdo Benigni received his education in chemistry at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". He then joined the Istituto Superiore di Sanita' (Italian National Institute of Health) where he got a permanent position in 1977, and where he remained except for two sabbaticals, at the New York University in 1988 and at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in 2000. He worked experimentally in the field of molecular biology and environmental chemical mutagenesis.

In the 1980's, he turned his attention to the statistical analysis and modeling of toxicological data, and to the study of the relationships between the structure of organic compounds and their toxicological properties (mainly mutagenesis and carcinogenesis). Dr. Benigni has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters, applying a wide variety of quantitative analysis techniques, including QSAR, to the examination of chemical toxicity information.

He has recently designed a new rulebase for predicting chemical mutagenicity and carcinogenicity, that has been implemented in the freely-available Toxtree 1.36 expert system at the European Chemicals Bureau..

Awaiting Profile

Mark Cronin is Professor of Predictive Toxicology in the School of Pharmacy and Chemistry at Liverpool John Moores University. He has research interests in the development of in silico approaches to predict the toxicity and fate of chemicals. This includes both environmental and human health endpoints.

Much current work is focussed on the requirements of regulatory users of predictive toxicology e.g. for REACH. Of particular interest is the assessment of how appropriate different predictive techniques are, as well as approaches to make toxicological decisions from a variety of in silico, in vitro and in chemico information. Mark has published one book and over 150 articles on predictive toxicology. In addition he has been involved in various EU projects as well as serving on European and OECD committees and Working Groups in the area of QSAR.

Héctor De León, PhD is a Scientist at Entelos, Inc, a Foster City, California life sciences company using predictive computer models of disease to improve human health. His interests include the genetic reprogramming of arterial cells and the contribution of chemorepellent molecules to repair mechanisms. At Entelos, his research is focused on developing systems approaches to reduce the costs and risks associated with drug development.

Dr. De León was previously Program Head at Genetic Therapy, Inc. (Novartis) and an Assistant Professor at Morehouse School of Medicine. He earned his PhD degree from McGill University, and conducted post-doctoral research at Emory University.

Dr. Greene received his B.Sc. in Chemistry and Computational Science from the University of Leeds (UK) in 1991. He was awarded his Ph.D. also from the University of Leeds (UK) in 1994 where his work focused on the synthesis of organophosphorus ligands and transition metal complexes for the catalysis of acetic acid production.

Following on from his Ph.D., Nigel worked at LHASA Ltd. in the UK promoting the use and development of the DEREK for Windows computer program for toxicity prediction. After 5 years at LHASA, Nigel then moved to Tripos Inc. where he promoted the use of the SYBYL molecular modeling software suite within the pharmaceutical industry. He has worked in Pfizer's Drug Safety R&D - Groton department since 2001 and leads the Toxicoinformatics laboratory aimed at developing new methods and tools for in-silico toxicity assessment to be used as part of the drug discovery and development process.

Dr. F. Peter Guengerich is a Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He received his B.S. from the Univ. of Illinois in 1970 and then did his graduate work at Vanderbilt University, receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1973. After two years as a research fellow at the University of Michigan, he was hired as Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt in 1975 and has been on faculty since then, having attained the rank of Professor in 1983. Prof. Guengerich has been Director of the Center in Molecular Toxicology, an interdepartmental program at Vanderbilt, since 1981.

Douglas Hawkins hails from Johannesburg, South Africa. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, and became Chair of Statistics before leaving academia to consult full time.

In 1986, he joined the University of Minnesota, and was Chair of Applied Statistics for six years.

He is a fellow of several statistical societies, and has won the Annual Statistics in Chemistry award twice, along with the Shewhart Medal, William Hunter Award, and Ellis Ott Award.

Research grants from US Federal agencies have supported his research in statistical diagnostics, quality improvement, and chemometrics. He continues to be active in consultancy.

Main works are researches on hazard/risk assessment of industrial chemicals, contaminants in drinking water and food contacts materials. Current emerging works are researches on the development of (Q)SAR system for industrial chemicals and the methodology for evaluating health effects by manufactured nanomaterials.

Dr. Matthews received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Duke University and has worked as a research scientist for industry, and as a regulatory review scientist for the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) and Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER).

His areas of expertise include computational toxicology, informatics, and genetic toxicology. Dr. Matthews is the Agency's Expert in the area of Computational Toxicology, and he directs FDA's Computational Toxicology (ComTox) Consultant Service and CDER's Computational Toxicology (ComTox) Program. Through this ComTox Consulting Service Agency scientists can request expert computational safety assessments of activities for substances, and obtain assistance in developing new computational toxicology software to meet specific regulatory applications.

Through the ComTox Program Dr. Matthews has helped established cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) between FDA and (1) Multicase, Inc.; (2) MDL Information Systems; (3) Leadscope, Inc.; and (4) Lhasa Ltd. Under these CRADAs new quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) software and QSAR Models are being developed to provide accurate and reliable predictions of potential toxicities of drug and other chemicals. In addition, these CRADAs are facilitating the retrieval of data from Agency archives and placing these data in the public domain in electronic relational databases and QSAR training data sets.

Dr. Matthews is the FDA representative to the OECD QSAR Workgroup which is currently developing a guidance for the use of QSARs to support regulatory decisions for REACH and 7th Amendment activities in the EU.

Dr Matthews has published many QSAR articles and has given over 100 talks furthering the use of QSARs to provide decision support information for Agency regulatory and research applications.

Awaiting profile.

Dr. Richard trained as a Computational Chemist and is currently a Principal Investigator at the US Environmental Protection Agency's National Center for Computational Toxicology. Past research has involved application of computational chemistry to structure-activity relationships (SAR) in environmental toxicology, and to the review and critique of structure-based predictive toxicology methods. She is project lead for the DSSTox Database Network, designed to improve the accessibility and standardization of public toxicity data, and is a member of the NCCT ToxCast team. These are broadening the foundation for improved toxico-chemoinformatics and SAR capabilities in predictive toxicology.

Dr Andrew Worth is the leader of the Computational Toxicology Project within the European Chemicals Bureau (ECB) at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). Dr Worth joined the JRC in 1996, with degrees in Physiological Sciences and linguistics, both from Oxford University. He subsequently gained a PhD in computational toxicology from Liverpool John Moores University.

At the JRC, Dr Worth has been involved in activities on chemical risk assessment, alternative test methods, and computational toxicology. Since 2003, he has led the Computational Toxicology group, which promotes the development, assessment, acceptance and implementation of computational methods suitable for the regulatory assessment of chemicals.

Chihae Yang joined Leadscope in 2000 from her position as a tenured chemistry professor at Otterbein College and adjunct professor at the Ohio State University.

She brings 25 years of experience in computational chemistry applied to lipid membranes, colloidal systems, and materials. She established the LIST focus group with grants from the US NIST Advanced Technology Program, and has worked with this group to deliver ToxML, a public toxicity database standard, and Leadscope Predictive Data Miner.

She serves as the chief scientific officer of Leadscope and a science advisor for Molecular Networks. Her research focus continues to be in developing methods to advance the toxicity prediction paradigm beyond the current QSAR approaches by linking chemical structural space with biology at molecular level.