Lori Gavrin, Ph.D., Executive Director, Corporate & Business Development, Tmunity
Lori Gavrin has 18 years of experience working in the field of drug discovery and development. She graduated as a Summa Cum Laude chemistry major from Colgate University and subsequently completed her PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of Professor Jeffrey Winkler.
Lori practiced medicinal chemistry for 12 years with Wyeth / Pfizer, where her responsibilities ranged from target identification to clinical candidate and spanned across multiple therapeutic areas including rare diseases, neuroscience, immuno-inflammation, metabolic disease and women’s health. She designed two compounds that have entered clinical development.
In 2013, Lori was accepted into the highly selective R&D Esprit Leadership Development Program at GlaxoSmithKline. This is a 3-year rotational program intended to provide GSK with a pipeline of high potential scientific leaders. Whilst in the Esprit program, Lori successfully drove work within three diverse R&D teams: Strategy and Portfolio, Maternal & Neonatal Health, and Discovery Partnerships with Academia. Lori then moved into a role as a Senior Director of Business Development for the Platform & Technology Sciences Division at GSK, where she designed the external strategy for small molecule and discovery platform technology licensing at GSK.
In August of 2018, Lori joined a University of Pennsylvania spin-out company, Tmunity, where she currently serves as Executive Director of Corporate and Business Development. She is also a passionate supporter of the promotion of women in the sciences, mentoring graduate students and increasing interactions between pharma, biotech and academia.
Lori chaired the Medicinal Chemistry Gordon Research Conference in 2015, served on the Long-Range Planning Committee for the ACS MEDI Division from 2016-2018 and is now part of the ACS Executive Board serving as Industrial Councilor. Lori serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Chemistry Department at the University of Pennsylvania, the BioStrategy Partners Organization and the Coulter Translational Drug Discovery Program at Drexel University. She has authored more than a dozen publications and is a named inventor on 11 patents.