Rathnam Chaguturu Joins SRI's Center for Advanced Drug Research as Senior Director of Exploratory Research
MENLO PARK, Calif. — January 25, 2012 — Rathnam Chaguturu, Ph.D., has joined SRI International's Center for Advanced Drug Research as senior director of Exploratory Research. He will be based at SRI Shenandoah Valley in Harrisonburg, Virginia. In this role, Dr. Chaguturu will partner with SRI's drug discovery and development teams and expand collaborative research relationships with academia, disease foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies.
"I am pleased to welcome Dr. Chaguturu to SRI International," said Krishna Kodukula, Ph.D., executive director and site head of CADRE in SRI Biosciences. "His initial areas of focus include providing access to new chemical libraries, working with specific disease foundations, and helping to bridge the gap between academic and pharmaceutical industry research through sponsored research."
Prior to joining SRI, Dr. Chaguturu was director of the High Throughput Screening Laboratory at the University of Kansas. He played a key role in securing government, commercial, and foundation funding to establish new research programs. He helped to build a drug discovery pipeline of novel therapeutic targets of interest in both common and neglected diseases.
Prior to his work in Kansas, Dr. Chaguturu was director of Drug Discovery at Sierra Sciences, focusing on anti-aging research. In addition, he led discovery research efforts at FMC Corporation for more than 20 years, where he focused on ion channel, receptor, enzyme, and cell-based targets, and was instrumental in designing the industry-first Zymark robotic screening platform for lead discovery.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Chaguturu was on the biochemistry faculty at Rutgers University. While a project leader at Dow Chemical Company, Chaguturu established the early principles of chemical library screening for lead discovery and developed tools for mining in-house chemistry archives.
Dr. Chaguturu has authored more than 50 research publications and holds 11 U.S. patents. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening. Dr. Chaguturu is also one of the founding members of the Society for Biomolecular Sciences and the founding president of the International Chemical Biology Society. He received his Ph.D. in plant biochemistry from SV University in Tirupati, India.
