MEDCHEM-2026

Dr. Kontoyianni holds a PhD in computational chemistry from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she worked under the supervision of Professor Phil Bowen. After a post-doctoral fellowship with Professor Terry Lybrand at the University of Washington, she joined ZymoGenetics, where she used computational methods in support of osteoporosis. She then moved to Research & Development of Fortune 500 companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, applying structure-based design to various therapeutic targets ranging from hit to lead optimization. In her most recent post and prior to joining academia, she was the Head of Drug Discovery at Crystax, a fragment-based biotechnology firm in Barcelona. She sits on the editorial board of several journals, holds nine patents, is a clinical consultant, panelist for the European Commission large scale grant application proposals, has been an NIH ad hoc reviewer for Bioengineering and Small Business and Technology Transfer in Drug Discovery and Development, and is regularly invited to speak at Drug Discovery conferences and symposia. Her area of expertise includes virtual screening, structure- and ligand-based molecular design, and hybrid computational approaches toward drug discovery.