New Associate Professor in Medicinal Chemistry

Michael Stocks joins the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Structural Biology in the School of Pharmacy. He is a medicinal chemist with a PhD in organic chemistry and over 20 years’ Medicinal Chemistry experience in the pharmaceutical industry working at AstraZeneca.

Michael has worked in all pre-clinical stages in the drug discovery process, specialising in discovering and optimising compounds in both oral and inhalation projects within several therapeutic areas. He has recently concentrated efforts on GPCR-based drug discovery, most recently delivering AstraZeneca's beta-2 and muscarinic M3 inhalation projects into clinical development. Michael was appointed as project leader for designing and delivering chemical libraries to enhance the AstraZeneca compound collection and during this time worked with contract research organisations in China, Russia and India. He has been co-author and inventor on over 50 publications and patent applications and recently co-authored a new “primer” book in medicinal chemistry: Stocks, Alcaraz and Griffen: On Medicinal Chemistry. In April 2012, he made the transition into academia and is actively looking for new collaborations to utilise the drug-discovery skills built up in the Pharma Industry.