Alexander Tropsha, PhD, has been named as the first associate dean for pharmacoinformatics and data science at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and will serve as the School’s chief informatics officer providing oversight and strategic direction for research and training programs in data-rich areas of pharmaceutical sciences.
Tropsha is the K. H. Lee Distinguished Professor in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. He is an expert in the fields of computational chemistry, cheminformatics, and structural bioinformatics and works to develop new methodologies and software tools for computer-assisted drug design. His particular expertise lies in the field of cheminformatics, a discipline where information and informatics methodologies are applied to storing, managing, exploring, and exploiting chemical databases.
As associate dean, Tropsha will lead the School’s efforts to design, implement, and coordinate the informatics infrastructure (including hardware and software support) for pharmaceutical science and the increasingly important research interface with patient-outcome directed activities. He will help all members of the School to recognize, evaluate, and exploit their “data space” using modern technologies.
Tropsha joined the School’s faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling. He was promoted to associate professor in 1997 and to full professor in 2004 and holds appointments as an adjunct professor in the UNC Department of Biomedical Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science and is a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was named as the K. H. Lee Distinguished Professor in 2008 and served as the School’s associate dean for research from 2011 to 2015. He has authored more than 190 peer-reviewed papers and twenty books and book chapters.