Is a career in industry for you?

TL;DR

This paper outlines Pamela Williams' career path in structural biology and pharmaceuticals, highlighting her work on protein-ligand structures and cryoEM in drug discovery.

Contribution

The paper presents insights into the industrial application and industrialization of cryoEM for drug discovery.

Findings

Pamela Williams has over twenty years of experience in pharmaceutical structural biology.

She led the evaluation of cryoEM as a structural technique for drug discovery in 2016.

Her current work focuses on industrializing cryoEM workflows for drug development.

Abstract

Pamela Williams is a structural biologist with more than twenty years of experience working in a pharmaceutical setting, supporting medicinal chemistry campaigns with protein-ligand structures, from initial fragments to final lead compounds. Following a bachelor’s degree in mathematics she was awarded a DPhil in time-resolved studies on macromolecules from the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, University of Oxford. She continued her postdoctoral research at the at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, where she worked on the X-ray structure determination of metalloenzymes involved in electron transfer and xenobiotic metabolism. She then returned to the UK to continue working on the structure determination of enzymes involved in metabolism at Astex Pharmaceuticals. In 2016 Pamela lead the evaluation of cryoEM as an emerging structural technique for structure-based drug discovery, and her current focus is the industrialisation of cryoEM workflows that will allow the full impact of cryoEM on the development on drugs to be realised.