Alastair Parkes currently leads a medicinal chemistry department at Evotec, a global drug discovery and development company. Evotec’s mission is to discover and develop highly effective therapeutics and make them globally available to the patients who need them.

Alastair joined the company in 2006, working first on central nervous system drug discovery programmes and oncology projects, before focusing on antibacterial research since January 2014.

He is a regular presenter at medicinal chemistry and antibacterial drug discovery conferences, sharing results from Evotec’s antibacterial research programmes focused both on specific targets and also the development of new tools. He has been a regular speaker on antibacterial drug discovery at Oxford University’s Centre for Doctoral Training in the UK, and has also published a number of papers in the field.

Before joining Evotec, Alastair was employed at the University of Manchester during his post-doctoral studies. He holds MChem and DPhil degrees in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford.