Jonathan Bentley Illustrator, Author & Editor

Jonathan Bentley is a VP, Scientific Director at Evotec in the Discovery Chemistry department in Abingdon UK. He is responsible for the scientific strategy on multiple collaborations and provides strategic leadership and support for scientific delivery across multi-disciplinary drug discovery programs. Within Evotec, he leads the cross-functional global Design Evolution initiative. He joined Evotec as a Project Leader in 2007 and was promoted to VP in 2020. Prior to Evotec, he was a Research Leader at the Psychiatry Centre of Excellence in Drug Design for GSK, Verona for 3.5 years after spending the formative phase of his industrial career at Vernalis in Reading, UK for 7 years. He has contributed to the identification of multiple clinical and preclinical candidates as project leader, or as part of multidisciplinary drug discovery teams in collaboration with international scientific and strategic partners. He has a PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Bristol, sponsored by SmithKline Beecham (1995). He spent a year in a post-doctoral position at University of Cape Town, supported by Schering AG (1995-6). He has worked on projects across many different therapeutic areas including Oncology, Inflammation, Pain, CNS (Anxiety, Depression, Drug Dependence, Schizophrenia, Insomnia, Neurodegeneration), Metabolic Diseases and Women‘s Health. He has enjoyed working on multiple target classes including agonists, antagonists, PAMs and NAMs of GPCRs from all classes, diverse enzyme inhibitors and activators, and ion channel blockers, openers, and modulators, as well as phenotypic endpoints. He was the first recipient of the RSC / SCI Capps-Green-Zomaya award in 2004.