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Kalpana Merchant, PhD - Executive Committee
Chief Scientific Leader, Integrative Biology
Eli Lilly and Company
Indianapolis, Indiana

Dr. Merchant received her undergraduate degree in Pharmacy from Bombay University and PhD in Neuropharmacology from University of Utah. She completed postdoctoral training at University of Washington in the Department of Pharmacology and continued at the institution as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. Subsequently, she joined the Upjohn Company (which later became Pharmacia Corporation through mergers), where she pursued drug discovery research for ten years on neurological and psychiatric diseases, including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, anxiety and major depression. At Eli Lilly and Company she has taken a lead role in building target and drug discovery research for Parkinson's disease.

Dr. Merchant's current research interests include: (a) understanding molecular etiology of neurodegenerative diseases with a focus on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's Disease, (b) identification of potential drug targets within the respective etiopathological pathways, (c) drug discovery approaches for disease modifying treatment for these disorders and (d) biomarker discovery and validation for application to early clinical trials. Her laboratory applies a multidisciplinary approach using cell and molecular biological techniques as well as systems level neurobiological assessment on animal models for target, drug and biomarker discovery and validation.