Robert Hilgraf

As Vice President of Molecular Design, Robert is responsible for leading the medicinal chemistry efforts at insitro by integrating machine-learning into the medicinal chemistry and drug discovery process. He is utilizing the company’s platform to move drug discovery programs towards the clinic.

Robert has 20 years of drug discovery experience, leading and building medicinal chemistry teams across multiple organizations, ranging from pharma to biotech to academic/industrial collaborations. Throughout his career, he has led many multidisciplinary teams successfully to deliver several clinical candidates across multiple therapeutic areas with the most advanced ones in Phase 2 studies.

Prior to joining insitro, Robert was Senior Director, Medicinal Chemistry, at Revolution Medicines in Redwood City, responsible for leading project teams and establishing early drug discovery pipeline efforts. Before that, he established and led medicinal chemistry and drug discovery efforts at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Boston. He started his industrial career at Celgene in San Diego.

After undergraduate studies at the University of Hamburg/Germany and Leicester/UK, Robert completed his PhD at the University of Basel/Switzerland in the Pfaltz group investigating asymmetric catalysis before joining the Sharpless group at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla) as a postdoc establishing click-chemistry bioconjugation methods.