Dr Amol Thakkar

Dr Amol Thakkar is a research scientist at IBM Research Zurich, where his research focuses on models to accelerate scientific discovery, specifically chemistry. He graduated with a Masters in Chemistry with first class honors from the University of St Andrews in 2017; during which time he completed a one-year internship with Pfizer as a synthetic chemist in Process Chemistry. Subsequently, he transitioned into computational chemistry and completed his PhD in under the supervision of Professor Jean-Louis Reymond at the University of Bern in collaboration with the Molecular AI team led by Ola Engkvist at AstraZeneca, graduating summa cum laude. His work has focused on Computer Aided Synthesis Prediction resulting in the open-source retrosynthetic planning tool called AiZynthFinder. He is currently working with the IBM RXN team led by Teodoro Laino for modelling and automation of organic chemistry.