C. Nicholas (Nick) Hodge received his doctorate in organic and analytical chemistry from Cornell University, and his interests have centered around two major areas: discovering safe, effective drugs for clinical testing in human disease, and leveraging the best available computational and experimental methods to improve this process. He has held senior leadership positions at DuPont Merck, Caliper Technologies, Amphora Discovery (founder), and Ruga Corp. Inventions from his corporate R&D labs include drugs for human clinical trials in several therapeutic areas, computational methods for drug design, and biological screening technology. Nick has extensive experience in the conception and execution of platform drug discovery startups, including commercialization strategy, fund-raising, business development, sales and in research management. He received the CED Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards in 2002 for Spinout of the Year as co-founder and CSO of Amphora Discovery, and has over 100 scientific publications and awarded patents.