Ian Watson

Dr. Ian Watson has more than 25 years of experience applying machine learning to small molecule drug discovery. Ian spent more than 20 years at Eli Lilly working across Lilly business units on business problems involving Analytics and Statistics, Machine Learning, High Performance Computing. As part of Discovery Chemistry, he built a substantial portion of the computational infrastructure currently used by Lilly to support small molecule drug discovery. This includes leading edge tools for substructure searching, very fast, and large-scale chemical similarity tools as well as SVM machine learning models. Dr. Watson implemented and now maintains the Lilly Medchem Rules, widely used for filtering compounds for biological testing. Ian most recently spent 3 years at Google where he worked with the Google Accelerated Science team on early phase small molecule drug discovery including extensive work on chemical similarity, clustering, enumeration and analysis, and hit follow-up. Dr. Watson has a BSc with honors from the Australian National University and a PhD from Cornell in Physical Chemistry.