Curriculum vitae of Robin W. Spencer
October 2024
|
curriculum vitae |
October 2024 |
retired 2019- |
genetic genealogy |
Mystic, CT |
Imaginatik PLC 2010-2019 |
innovation support |
Director of Research & software developer Mystic, CT and Boston, MA |
Pfizer, Inc. 1987-2010 |
pharmaceuticals |
Research & Development Groton, CT |
2010 |
retired |
2006 |
Senior Research Fellow, Innovation and the Idea Farm |
2004 |
Executive Director, Exploratory Medicinal Sciences |
2001 |
Group Director, Discovery Biology |
1998 |
Research Director, Chemistry |
1994 |
Assistant Director, Medicinal Chemistry |
1990 |
Manager, Medicinal Chemistry |
1990 |
Manager, New Leads Exploratory Medicinal Biology |
1987 |
Project Leader, Pharmacology |
|
Syntex, Inc. 1981-1987 |
pharmaceuticals |
Research Section Leader, Institute of BioOrganic Chemistry Mississauga, Ontario |
postdoctoral 1978-1981 |
biochemistry |
University of Wisconsin, Madison, and M.I.T. Helen Hay Whitney fellow, William H. Orme-Johnson, adviser |
Ph.D. 1973-1978 |
biochemistry |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA National Science Foundation fellow, Christopher T. Walsh, adviser |
B.A. 1969-1973 |
physics |
Williams College, Williamstown MA magna cum laude, honors, Phi Beta Kappa 1972 |
After college, graduate school, and postdoc, I was a lab supervisor in Syntex doing mechanism-based drug design for 6 years. Moving to Pfizer, I co-invented the discipline of High Throughput Screening (HTS) and led the team that found the first non-peptidic antagonists of Substance P, bombesin, CRH, and many others. I rose through management ranks from Project Leader (1987) to Executive Director (2004), the latter with a 110-person department including all HTS, high-speed chemistry, outsourcing, & computational chemistry for Pfizer's largest research site, and served on numerous local and international management teams, several as chairman and with third-party partnerships. I've received Pfizer Global R&D's highest personal achievement award and the company's Upjohn Innovation award.
In 2006 I chose to make a lateral career move out of management, inventing and taking the unique role of full-time innovation and idea management leader for all of Pfizer's 15,000 person R&D division. As author and facilitator of over 200 business challenges in four years, I have a deep, practical, and diverse base of experience in collective approaches to business needs. My title was Senior Research Fellow, Pfizer's highest non-management position. I retired from Pfizer in 2010 and became Director of Research at Imaginatik PLC, helping to bring scalable collaborative processes to major corporate clients via custom algorithm, code, and visualization development.
I was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Toronto, and have taught in Connecticut College Medicinal Chemistry courses.
I have always had a shadow career in computer science, publishing and writing serious, heavily used applications to support my other roles. I've written commercial-grade stand-alone Macintosh applications and many commercial client-side and full-stack applications in Javascript.
I have always had a passion for finding patterns in large sets of data and then doing something practical with those observations. I believe that important and useful things tend to be complex and cannot be oversimplified, though that complexity can be layered and managed to help implement solutions at appropriate levels. While I enjoy the academic scientist's approach (explore, discover, synthesize, publish, teach), I am a champion of the private sector as the most efficient, effective, and sustainable place to implement change. I am a micro-and-macro thinker: happy to craft strategy and processes, yet equally happy to dive into spreadsheets, algorithms, and low-level implementation, and have always found that each illuminates the other. I enjoy writing and public speaking as the details below will attest.
In retirement I have found an engrossing hobby in genetic genealogy, and am bringing the same approaches to bear on this burgeoning field where citizen science is very active.
Find me on Google
Genetic Genealogy Website