Nicola Richmond, Ph.D.

Program Co-Chair

Nicola Richmond is Vice President of AI at BenevolentAI and is responsible for their AI strategy and ensuring the company maintains its leading position in the AI-enabled drug discovery industry. Fundamentally, she is driven by applying AI technology to solve challenging problems in the drug discovery space and to ultimately make a difference in patients’ lives.

Richmond has a Ph.D. in pure mathematics and has worked at the intersection of AI and drug discovery for 22 years. During her post-doc, she developed the algorithm that lies at the heart of a commercial product (GALAHAD) that has been used throughout the worldwide pharmaceutical industry to elucidate 3D pharmacophores for virtual screening.

Richmond joined GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2004 where she made several key contributions. Her statistical approaches for actioning high-throughput screening data are in continual use across GSK’s early drug discovery portfolio, and her work on predicting the stable expression of therapeutic antibodies has significantly reduced manufacturing cell line development timelines. She also built and led the GSK.ai Fellowship Programme which has helped educate and inspire the next generation of brilliant minds who want to apply AI to drug discovery and impressively achieved a 50:50 ratio of women to men.