Jeff Saunders

Jeff Saunders brings over 25 years of drug discovery, team building, and leadership experience in start-up and early-stage discovery organizations. Over the last decade, he has been a pioneer and leader in developing and evolving outsourcing models for effective and highly productive drug design teams.

Jeff joined Nuvalent Therapeutics in 2017 as vice president of chemistry and was a co-founder of Resilience Therapeutics in 2014, a company developing therapies for anxiety- and trauma-related disorders. Prior to that, he held the position of vice president of small molecule drug discovery at Ember Therapeutics. Before joining Ember in 2012, Jeff was the vice president of chemistry at Agios. He also worked as a consultant at Elixir Pharmaceuticals, where he managed all chemistry and related intellectual property for five years. Prior to this, he held the position of principal investigator at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he worked for 14 years as chemistry head and project head for multiple programs. Previously, he was a research scientist at the Squibb Institute for Medical Research.

Jeff received his A.B. in chemistry from Hope College in Michigan, earned his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of South Carolina, and held an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.