Avner Schlessinger, PhD

Dr. Avner Schlessinger is a Professor of Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, an Associate Director of Mt. Sinai Center for Therapeutics Discovery, and Co-Director of the Disease Mechanisms and Therapeutics (DMT) Training Area. Dr. Schlessinger graduated from Tel Aviv University with a BSc in Biology and Chemistry, and completed his PhD from Columbia University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. As a PhD student, he developed programs predicting protein structure and function using various machine-learning approaches such as artificial neural networks. Following his graduate studies, Dr. Schlessinger was an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF, where he established methods for computer-aided drug design and used these approaches to rationally design tool compounds for membrane proteins. The overall goal of Dr. Schlessinger’s lab is to improve and automate the drug discovery process by integrating approaches in computational chemistry and artificial intelligence, and applying these methods to characterize disease pathways. His lab publishes in the areas of chemical biology, bioinformatics, and drug discovery, as well as in precision medicine and pharmacogenomics. Dr. Schlessinger serves on the Editorial Boards of PLOS Computational Biology and Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, as well as on the Advisory Board of various biotechnology companies and international consortia.