Chris Waller

Dr. Waller is currently Vice President and Chief Scientist of the Life Sciences business unit at EPAM Systems, Inc. where his focus is on using data and analytics to transform pharmaceutical research and development. Dr. Waller received his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1992. Following graduation, Dr. Waller accepted a post-doctoral fellowship under the direction of Dr. Garland Marshall at Washington University in St. Louis where he focused his efforts on the design HIV protease inhibitors. In 1993, Dr. Waller accepted a position with the U.S. EPA in which he was responsible for the development of structure-activity relationship and pharmacokinetic models as a research chemist and leader of a team of analytical, computational, and synthetic organic chemists, toxicologists, and biomedical engineers. From 1996-1999, Dr. Waller served as a Research Manager at OSI Pharmaceuticals. In this role, he managed a group of computational chemists, scientific application developers, and robotics engineers. In early 1999, Dr. Waller joined Eli Lilly- Sphinx Laboratories as a computational chemist and Head of Cheminformatics in the Discovery Chemistry group. Between 2001 and 2012, Dr. Waller held a number of positions in the research and informatics divisions at Pfizer, Inc. From 2012-2017, Dr. Waller held a number of positions at Merck & Co. initially as Head of Cheminformatics and culminating in the role of Executive Director of Predictive Modeling Platforms and Data Science. Dr. Waller is on faculty at Northeastern University where he lectures on leadership and analytics, holds an Adjunct Professor position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an Advisory Board member and benefactor of the Hurt Hub at Davidson College, a center dedicated to data science and innovation, and is a founding Board Member of the Pistoia Alliance, a not-for-profit organization focusing on pre-competitive collaborations in pharmaceutical research information technology.