Elisabetta Chiarparin, PhD, is Senior Vice President and Head of Discovery & Development Technologies at Merck KGaA. With more than 20 years of drug discovery experience in the CNS and Oncology therapeutic areas, gained at GlaxoSmithKline, Astex Pharmaceuticals and AstraZeneca, Elisabetta has led structural, computational and medicinal chemistry teams and contributed to the development of several preclinical and clinical candidates. She is passionate about drugging the 'difficult to drug targets' and of Structure Based Drug Design. Elisabetta is co-author of over 50 publications, patents, posters, and oral presentations and holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.