Anna K. H. Hirsch is a professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Saarland University and head of the department for drug design and optimization at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS).

Her work focuses on anti-infective drug design by adopting rational approaches such as structure- and fragment-based drug design in combination with the protein-templated strategies of dynamic combinatorial chemistry and kinetic target-guided synthesis.

Anna has authored more than 125 peer-reviewed papers and has received numerous awards, such as the Gratama Science Prize in 2014, the SCT-Servier Prize for Medicinal Chemistry in 2015, the Innovation Prize for Medicinal Chemistry of the GdCh/DPhG in 2017 and 2019, the EFMC Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia runner-up Prize.

Anna Natural Sciences with a focus on chemistry at the University of Cambridge and spent her third year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doing a research project with Prof. Timothy Jamison. She carried out her Master’s research project in the group of Prof. Steven V. Ley at the University of Cambridge.

Anna received her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2008 in the group of Prof. François Diederich and then joined the group of Prof. Jean-Marie Lehn at the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg as a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) postdoctoral fellow. Anna then took a position as an assistant professor at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry at the University of Groningen in 2010 and was promoted to associate professor in 2015.