Dafydd Owen

Dafydd Owen has twenty-five years of experience as a medicinal chemist in the design and synthesis of drug-like molecules for Pfizer at its Sandwich UK and Cambridge MA research sites. He obtained his first degree at Imperial College in 1994 before moving to the University of Cambridge to gain a PhD under the supervision of Professor Steve Ley FRS in 1997. Having won a research fellowship for postdoctoral work, he spent 1998 with Professor Leo Paquette at Ohio State University. During his research career he has delivered over one hundred invited lectures and is an author on over seventy research papers and patents. He has been recognized through Pfizer's highest scientific honor, The Breakthrough Science and Innovation Prize, the Pfizer Worldwide R&D People Leader Award and was also selected as an ACS Organic Division Young Industrial Investigator earlier in his career. He serves as a board member of the Structural Genomics Consortium and was on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry from 2015-2022. He currently works in an outward looking, academically collaborative group for Pfizer looking to better understand protein families and their role in human disease through chemistry. Most recently he led Pfizer's oral protease inhibitor program that ultimately delivered PAXLOVID, the world's first oral anti-viral therapy for the treatment of COVID-19. This work was recognized by the American Chemical Society through the 2022 Heroes of Chemistry Award and in 2023 with an honorary degree of ’Doctor of Science at Bangor University, Wales for Outstanding Scholarship and Innovation’.