Our Team of Scientists

Sean Ekins, PhD, DSc, Founder, Board Member, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Ekins graduated from the University of Aberdeen; receiving his M.Sc., Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacology and D.Sc in Science. Sean was a postdoctoral fellow at Lilly Research Laboratories. He has worked previously as a senior scientist at Pfizer and Lilly Research Laboratories, Associate Director of Computational Drug Discovery at Concurrent Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Vice President of Computational Biology at GeneGo, CSO at Collaborative Drug Discovery and CEO and Co-Founder at Phoenix Nest. Sean has co-authored >365 peer reviewed scientific papers, over 40 book chapters and numerous patents as well as edited/ co-edited five books. He has recently published his first book titled Winning Grants. He has received extensive support from NIH, DOD and DTRA for machine learning, drug discovery, rare and neglected disease and computational toxicology projects, raising > $17M.

Maggie A.Z. Hupcey, PhD, Chief Operating Officer

Dr. Hupcey graduated from Cornell University with a PhD in Chemistry and has since had positions in strategy and project management at companies across medical devices, drug discovery, and vaccines.  She was most recently Senior Manager, Exploratory Development at GSK where she was accountable for the technical development of three Phase 1 programs.  Dr. Hupcey brings nearly 20 years of strategic and operational experience to the company, has several publications and patents as well as contributed to editing a book on collaborations. 

Thomas Lane, MS, PhD, Associate Director

Dr. Lane graduated with a Ph.D.  in molecular and cellular biophysics at UNC Chapel Hill after studying the function and structure of microtubule-actin cross-linking proteins, spectraplakins. His research focused on using many different biophysical techniques, with a central focus on X-ray crystallography, to develop a structural model of a module of the spectraplakin ACF7. He obtained a M.S. in biochemistry from UNCG, where he characterized a recently deorphanized GPCR, GPR35, in silico.  Tom joined the company in 2017 and has been a senior scientist since 2018.

Aaron Oliver, BA, MBA, Business Development Manager

Aaron graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.A. in Biology. He went on to receive his MBA, with a concentration in Marketing, from The University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to joining Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Aaron worked as a scientist at BASF Plant Science for 9 years, where he designed, developed, and carried out high-throughput agricultural research experiments with a wide range of objectives. Aaron is big Tar Heels and tennis fan.

Scott Snyder, MS, Research Fellow

Scott graduated with a B.E. in Electrical Engineering, Summa Cum Laude from The Cooper Union, attended Cornell University and most recently received an M.S. in Statistics and Operations Research from UNC-Chapel Hill. He brings decades of experience in data analysis, machine learning and software development. He has previously worked in various technical positions for Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, NIEHS and Texas Instruments. He was at IBM Corporation for 16 years rising to the position of Chief Performance Architect / Technical Manager and most recently he was responsible for Metrics and Measurement COE at Fidelity Investments. Scott has multiple publications and patents on software.

Renuka Raman, PhD, Senior Scientist

Dr. Raman graduated from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research with a PhD in Biological Sciences where she studied the mechanism of formation of actin-based structures called ‘Microridges’ in epithelial tissues using the zebrafish model. She went on to do her postdoctoral fellowship in cancer biology and precision medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York where she identified the mechanism of resistance to targeted therapies in RET rearranged thyroid cancers and identified combination therapies to overcome drug resistance. Dr. Raman has co-authored more than 20 scientific publications. Prior to joining Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, she worked at Xilis, where she used her expertise to advance precision oncology for various cancer types using patient derived models.

Josh Harris, PhD, Senior Scientist

Dr. Harris is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he received a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering as well as a B.A. in English. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in Materials Science from NCSU, with most of his graduate research work focused on modeling defects in wide bandgap III-N semiconductors using atomistic simulations based on Density Functional Theory. Before joining Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Jacob Jones group at NCSU, where he used convolutional neural networks and other computational models to analyze transmission electron micrographs of material interfaces.

Patricia Vignaux, PhD, Staff Scientist

Dr. Vignaux graduated from The University of Texas at Arlington in 2013 with a B.S in Biology, and in 2019 completed her Ph.D. in Genetics and Molecular Biology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her graduate work included using CRISPR-based genome engineering to create a cellular assay to examine the dependence of DNA methylation sites on long-term HP1α-induced epigenetic gene silencing. In the summer of 2019, Patricia completed an ImPACT internship followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship with Collaborations Pharmaceuticals investigating Alzheimer's Disease targets for drug-repurposing.

Thane Jones, PhD, Staff Scientist

Dr. Jones earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Roanoke College in 2017. He then went on to North Carolina State University, receiving his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 2022. His graduate work focused on the total synthesis of the marine natural product, abyssomicin C. He has been focused on the design of small organic molecules as potential drug leads.

Jacob Gerlach, BS, Intern

Jacob recieved his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at North Carolina State University. He is currently studying for a masters at North Carolina State University. As a full-stack software developer intern, Jacob has contributed data curation libraries and user-friendly web-based tools for drug discovery as well as experience designing and training custom machine learning.

Sean Burk, BS, Intern

Sean received his B.S. in mathematics with a concentration in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his stay at UNC he worked on cellular and molecular simulations for research in computational biology. After an internship in Chemical Informatics at Sciome, Sean began to again work for UNC where he developed software for the NMR department.

Jason Wong, Intern

Jason is an undergraduate student at North Carolina State University majoring in computer science with a focus in machine learning and software engineering. He is also part of the computer science Accelerated Bachelor's/Master's program. Previously, he worked at the Real-Time and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at NCSU, where he worked with reinforcement learning and control algorithms for autonomous racing. As an intern, Jason works on developing machine learning models for various applications.