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Dr. Wells is the Harry W. and Diana Hind Professor in the Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco. From 1998 to 2005 Dr. Wells was a co-founder, Director, President and CSO of Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, a drug discovery and development company using a novel site-directed drug discovery technology. Prior to Sunesis, he held the position of Staff Scientist at Genentech for 16 years where he helped build the Protein Engineering Department and developed technology for designing second-generation protein therapeutics. Dr. Wells' current research focuses on protease signaling pathways and site-directed chemical biology, a new field that systematically interrogates the roles of specific sites on proteins in cells using small molecules. Dr. Wells received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Washington State University in 1979 and was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Post-doctoral Fellow in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University prior to joining Genentech in 1982. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and been named inventor on more than 60 patents issued or filed. He has won a number of research awards including, most recently, the Hans Neurath Award presented by the Protein Society in 2003, the Cutting Award Lecture at Stanford University in 2005 and the Perlman Lecture Award of the ACS Biotechnology Division in 2006. In 1999 he was elected Member to the National Academy of Sciences, USA. | 