Craig Lindsley

Craig W. Lindsley, Ph.D. is the Director of the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery (WCNDD), University Professor (also Professor of Pharmacology, Chemistry & Biochemistry) and Editor-in-Cheif of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Craig graduated in 1992 from California State University, Chico with a B.S. in Chemistry, received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Lipshutz), in 1996, and pursued postdoctoral studies at Harvard University (Shair). In 2001, Craig accepted a position at Merck & Co where he pioneered, in positions of increasing responsibility, the development of allosteric ligands for Akt, mGlu5 and M1, providing critical proof-of-concept compounds that validated the mechanism of allosteric modulation and clinical candidates. In 2006, Craig accepted an Associate Professor position in Pharmacology and Chemistry at Vanderbilt University, and promoted to Full Professor in 2009. In that same year, Craig became the founding Editor-in-Chief of ACS Chemical Neuroscience and was also awarded the ASPET-Astellas Award for Translational Pharmacology. In 2012, he was awarded an endowed chair, the William K. Warren, Jr. Chair in Medicine. The following year, Craig was awarded the Portoghese Lectureship from the ACS MEDI division and the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry for impact in the field of medicinal chemistry, and in 2014, received the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology from ASPET. More recently, Craig was inducted as an AAAS Fellow, awarded the Pharmacia-ASPET Award in Experimental Therapeutics and named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (2015, 2016 and 2017 (Now Clarivate)) as well as a Thomson Reuters World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds (2016). In 2018, Craig was honored as the the 22nd Smissman Memorial Lecturer (KU Department of Medicinal Chemistry) and the 2018 Sato Memorial International Award. Together with Jeff Conn, Craig has pioneered the concept of GPCR allosteric modulation, developing key proof of concept compounds and clinical candidates. Craig holds over 104 issued US patents and has published over 530 manuscripts and another 200 published patent applications. As co-founder and Director of the WCNDD, Craig has raised over $290 million in licensing and research support from NIH, Foundations and companies. In 2016, and without an industry partner, Craig oversaw IND-enabling studies of a novel M1 PAM that was awarded an open IND, and the Phase I trial (SAD) was completed at Vanderbilt prior to licensing to Acadia.