Michelle Arkin

Michelle Arkin, Ph.D., is Professor and Department Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and an adjunct professor at the Buck Institute of Research on Aging. Her lab focuses on developing first-in-class compounds for novel targets in diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, with a particular interest in protein-protein interactions and protein-degradation networks. Michelle is a leader in academic drug discovery, with leadership roles at the UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center, the international Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium, and the Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium. Prior to her role at UCSF, Michelle was a founding scientist at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover potent inhibitors of IL-2 and the anti-inflammatory drug Lifitegrast (Novartis), and to develop the anti-cancer experimental therapeutic vosaroxin. Michelle earned her Ph.D. with Jackie Barton at Caltech and held a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship with Jim Wells at Genentech.