Who We Are

Dr. Rav Kumar
Dr. Rav Kumar is Director of the CMC at UTM and an Assistant Professor. He was previously Special Advisor to the President and Principal. He also provides strategic advice to various life sciences start-ups in Ontario.

Dr. Patrick Gunning 
Professor Patrick Gunning is the Chief Scientific Director of the CMC and a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at UTM.  His work has generated more than $40 million in investments over the past five years. He is the co-founder and CSO of Dalriada Drug Discovery, has founded three other biotech companies with over $34M in funding, including Janpix Inc, now a Centessa Pharmaceuticals’ company, Dunad Therapeutics, and Dalriada Therapeutics.

Dr. Elvin de Araujo 
Dr. Elvin de Araujo is the Research Manager for the Centre for Medicinal Chemistry. His research focuses on exploring and targeting oncogenic proteins in the context of medicinal chemistry and structural biophysics. He also oversees CMC staff and trainees and facilitates their entrepreneurial growth in building spin-off companies to their value inflection point.

Professor Scott Prosser
R. Scott Prosser is a University of Toronto Professor of Biophysical Chemistry and AstraZeneca Research Chair. He is appointed to the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Scott's research focuses on problems relating to protein structure, dynamics, and drug discovery using NMR. His recent efforts have centered on new methods to study membrane protein topology and dynamics and protein folding.

Professor Joshua N. Milstein
Dr. Milstein is the Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Research in the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences at University of Toronto.  The Milstein Lab at the University of Toronto is actively developing the next generation of single-molecule and single-cell optical imaging and manipulation techniques. 

Rebecca Allan, PhD Candidate
Rebecca is an international PhD student from the UK. As a medicinal chemist, she focuses on the development of small molecules inhibitors for a variety of rare diseases and cancers. She is interested in entrepreneurship and commercialization of novel drug candidates. 

Dr. Carolyn Cummins 
Professor Carolyn Cummins is Associate Professor and Director of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Graduate Program at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.  She is co-Director of PRiME, the precision medicine initiative at UofT that fosters collaboration across divisions to tackle unmet needs in drug discovery, diagnostics and disease biology.  Her lab investigates nuclear hormone receptors  as drug targets in metabolic and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Robert Batey 
Professor Robert Batey is the Chair of Chemistry at the Unversity of Toronto. His research program encompasses the development of new organic reactions, catalysis, organoboron chemistry, the synthesis of heterocycles, macrocyclic and alkaloid natural products, and their application in probing cellular processes and as anticancer and antibiotic agents. Over his career he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Canadian Society of Chemistry - Bader Award in 2014.

Dr. Roman Fleck
Roman is the CEO & President of Janpix, Inc., an oncology drug development company, now a part of Centessa Pharmaceuticals (NASDQ: CNTA), as well as the Chairman of Omniose, a vaccine development company. Previously, he was a Principal and then Venture Partner/Advisor at Medicxi (formerly Index Ventures Life Sciences) where among others he invested in and represented Medicxi on the boards of GlycoVaxyn (sold to GSK), Versartis (NASDQ: VSAS), and Novocure (NASDQ: NVCR). 

Dr. Bettina Hamelin 
Dr. Bettina Hamelin is the President and CEO of Ontario Genomics. Before assuming her current role in August 2017, Bettina served as Vice-President of NSERC’s Research Partnerships Directorate, where she was responsible for a range of programs designed to stimulate increased public/private sector collaboration and technology transfer by connecting the Canadian research enterprise to Canadian and global innovation stakeholders.

Dr. Jason Moffat
Jason is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and the Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto. His research is dedicated to studying cell growth and proliferation in cancer cells and in developing new technologies to study gene function at the cellular level. He has created genome-scale technologies for functional genetic analyses of all human genes and developed methods for the generation of synthetic protein affinity reagents. Jason is a Senior Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and Canada Research Chair in Functional Genetics.

Ms. Aisha Sharif 
Aisha Sharif is the Assistant Director, Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Vice-Principal Academic and Dean at the University of Toronto Mississauga.  Aisha brings over 12 years of extensive knowledge in University governance, policies and procedures by implementing administrative, financial and operational efficiencies in accordance with the tri-campus. She is responsible for providing operational leadership to all academic departments at UTM while ensuring the physical and technical infrastructure exists to support the research and teaching activities.

Dr. Claudio Sturino
Claudio is the Senior Director, Head of Chemistry at Admare.

Lubna Abu Jazar
Lubna Abu-Jazar is the laboratory technician and lab lead at the CMC. She brings over nine (9) years of experience in fast-paced academic and industrial research labs encompassing organic chemistry, cellular biology, molecular biophysics, and animal studies and has extensive knowledge in lab operations and specialized lab equipment. She has managed over $30M in funding, as well as $7M in Canadian Foundation of Innovation (CFI) grants. Lubna worked with the architects and project managers to design and establish the CMC infrastructure. Furthermore, she has been involved with the spinout company Dalriada Drug Discovery, and has a passion to grow R&D.