John Wei, Ph.D.

Vice President, Medicinal Chemistry

John Wei joined Pharmaron in early 2009 as Vice President of Medicinal Chemistry, bringing over 18 years of experience in drug discovery & delivery with expertise in CNS and pain.  Prior to this appointment, Dr. Wei held various senior scientific positions with increasingly responsibilities at AstraZeneca R&D Montreal, Canada, where he most recently was a Project Chemistry Leader & CCTM for a number of drug discovery projects, leading all the chemistry activities (medicinal, computational & structural chemistry efforts, scale up, external collaborations and CRO resources) and interacting with scientists from other disciplines (in-vitro and in-vivo pharmacology, ADME-PK and toxicology) to the non-clinical development group. During his career with AstraZeneca, Dr. Wei has contributed significantly to the discovery of several clinical drug candidates.

A member of the American Chemical Society since 1994, Dr. Wei is a member of the Carbohydrate, Organic and Medicinal Chemistry divisions within the ACS. He recently served as a referee for a number of scientific journals such as Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Synthesis, and Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Dr. Wei has authored or co-authored over 50 publications, review articles, patents and pending applications.      

Dr. Wei obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1988 in synthetic organic chemistry with Prof. T.H. Chan from Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and received post-doctoral trainings in the Department of Chemistry, McGill University and the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Alberta, Canada.  He earned his B.Sc. in chemistry from Hunan University, China in 1983.