Barbara Slusher is Professor of Neurology (primary), Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Medicine and Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Director of the Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery program (https://drugdiscovery.jhu.edu/). Before joining Johns Hopkins, she spent 18 years in the pharmaceutical industry, including several years at the level of Senior Vice President of Research and Translational Development. She has extensive experience in drug discovery through early clinical development and was involved in the successful development, launch and/or post marketing support of several branded medicines including Seroqul™, Aloxi™, Dacogen™, Lucedra™.

At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Slusher leads the largest integrated drug discovery program on campus with a veteran team of medicinal chemists, assay developers, pharmacologists, toxicologists, and pharmacokinetics/drug metabolism experts with an average of 15 years Pharma R&D drug discovery experience. The team is engaged in identifying novel drug targets arising from the faculty’s research and translating them into new drug therapies for clinical development. She also founded and is leading the first International Consortium of Academic Drug Discovery (www.addconsortium.org) with over 150 university-led translational centers and 1500 members in an effort to coordinate and enhance academic drug discovery.