Chief Executive Officer
As chief executive officer at Psivant Therapeutics, Woody is responsible for the vision and execution of Psivant’s mission to design better therapeutics, atom by atom. Woody also oversees QUAISAR platform development.
Woody joined Roivant Sciences from Silicon Therapeutics, where he was chief scientific officer. Woody is recognized as a leader in computational chemistry, biomolecular simulations, and computationally-driven drug design. Under Woody’s scientific leadership, Silicon Therapeutics successfully advanced their lead STING small molecule agonist program from concept to the clinic in just a few years with only ~200 molecules synthesized in the lab (while millions of compounds were explored in silico), thus establishing the value of an integrated therapeutics organization with cutting-edge capabilities in predictive computational methods to solve real-world drug discovery problems.
Woody previously served as vice president and global head of applications science at Schrödinger, Inc., a leader in computational chemistry software development. During his tenure at Schrödinger, Woody was part of the senior management team, spearheaded the modeling services initiative, led the development of novel methods and oversaw the deployment of products to customers. Woody is a leader in molecular simulations and computer-aided drug design, with more than 90 publications and patents covering novel methods and applications. Woody has published on a broad range of topics including free energy simulations, molecular dynamics, induced-fit docking, virtual screening, lead optimization, selectivity design, cheminformatics, machine learning, and protein design. He is on the editorial board of Chemical Biology & Drug Design and the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Woody worked on the program planning committee for The Protein Society‘s 35th Anniversary Symposium and also serves on the advisory board at Pharmacelera.
Woody earned a doctor of philosophy degree with Professor Bruce Tidor, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and obtained undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.