Dr. Maria Alvim-Gaston Company: Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN Professional Affiliations:  ACS Member at Large, Local Indiana Section

Dr. Maria Alvim Gaston graduated from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with a B.S in Pharmacy in 1988. She continued with her education and obtained an Industrial Pharmacy degree in 1989 from the same institution. She joined the Chemistry Department at UFRJ to obtain her MS in Organic Chemistry in 1992. At that time she was selected by CNPq, a Brazilian government institution, to come to the United States to work as a visiting scholar for 2 years. Maria joined the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of Mississippi, in August, 1993 to do research on synthesis of antimalarial analogs of Artemisinin. At the end of this research program, Maria was invited by the Medicinal Chemistry department at Ole Miss to join their PhD. program. Upon receiving her PhD in May 2000, she joined Eli Lilly & Company where she held various positions in computational chemistry and discovery operations. In her current role, Maria is Principal Research Scientist in the External Innovation group and provides medicinal/computational chemistry expertise to Lilly’s Open Innovation Drug Discovery program (OIDD). Maria has published several scientific and computational chemistry papers in peer-reviewed journals. Maria was selected as one of the TOP 100 innovators of Eli Lilly & Company in 2013. She is also an executive board member of the Organization for Latin Americans within Lilly and is serving third term as Member-at-Large in the local ACS chapter.