Alex Waterson, PhD
Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cancer Drug Discovery (VCCDD)
Associate Director of Drug Discovery for the VICB
Research Professor of Pharmacology
Research Professor of Chemistry
- : a.waterson@vanderbilt.edu
- : 615-322-9971
- :
802C Robinson Research Building
NExT Program (National Cancer Institute Experimental Therapeutics Program)
Alex G. Waterson, Ph.D. is currently Research Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Chemistry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Classically trained as a synthetic organic chemist, he completed his Ph.D. studies with Professor Al Padwa at Emory University, and conducted postdoctoral research at Colorado State University in the group of the late Professor Albert I. Meyers. Alex joined a medicinal chemistry team at GlaxoSmithKline in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina in 2001, contributing to the discovery of covalently modifying ErbB inhibitors and the B-Raf drug Dabrafenib, among other projects.
Upon transitioning to Vanderbilt in 2008, he helped establish the National Cancer Institute-funded Vanderbilt Center for Cancer Drug Discovery and joined Professor Fesik’s fragment-based discovery team. He has led primarily oncology drug discovery projects aimed at direct and indirect inhibition of K-RAS, as well as protease, epigenetic, and cancer metabolism targets. As Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry for the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology, he continues to impact small-molecule discovery projects across the University and its associated medical center.
Dr. Waterson has co-authored 51 peer-reviewed manuscripts, and is a named co-inventor on 25 published patent applications. He is an active member of the Chemistry in Cancer Research Workgroup of the American Association for Cancer Research, and is currently an Editorial Advisory Board member for ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters.