Lauren Monovich

Lauren Gilchrist Monovich, Ph.D.
Director
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation

Lauren Monovich received a B.A. with honors in Chemistry from Kalamazoo College before completing her doctoral studies with Professor Gary Molander on the total synthesis of natural products. After joining Novartis in 1998, Lauren has had the privilege to contribute to or lead drug discovery projects across multiple disease areas, project stages, and modalities and to be an inventor of a marketed medicine (Isturisa/osilodrostat for Cushing’s Disease). In 2018, she received the Novartis Leading Scientist award for her work on oral peptides. She heads a global group specialized in generating high quality leads for drug discovery projects, but also focuses her scientific skills on a subset of projects with especially challenging protein surfaces. She established and co-leads the Integrated Library Team of experts on library technology, design and strategy. She is an active recruiter on behalf of Global Discovery Chemistry, founding member of Novartis’s Women in Chemistry Group, co-lead of Novartis’s Inclusion Council, and contributor to educational community outreach. She is married to an artist and mother to three children, ages 20, 17, and 13.