Dr Emma King-Smith

Emma began her career as an experimental chemist, performing undergraduate research with Professor Dean Toste at the University of California, Berkeley in organometallics methods development. Upon graduation, she joined the process chemistry team at Genentech (South San Francisco) for a year and gained a deep appreciation for drug development, prompting her return to academia for a PhD. Emma's graduate studies were completed under the tutelage of Professor Hans Renata at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. During her tenure there, she gained expertise in enzyme-mediated total synthesis, completing novel routes to a wide range of molecules including: diterpenoids, meroterpenoids, and NRP natural products. Currently, Emma is continuing her journey as a synthetic chemist, but this time with an emphasis on developing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for drug discovery and development. In the past decade, AI/ML has seen historic breakthroughs in computer vision, game optimization, and language understanding. Emma is researching the untapped potential in for these algorithms to predict chemical outcomes and deepen our understanding of how molecules interact with one another.