Dr. Florian Montel grew up in the southeast of France and received his Master’s degree from the school of Chemistry of Montpellier in 2001. He obtained his Ph.D. at Sanofi-Aventis in 2005 under the supervision the Paris VI university for the total synthesis of Cyclostreptin. He joined Novartis in Basel in 2005 for a post-doctoral position. After that, he spent 8 years at UCB in Belgium being project leader of CNS projects. He was also implied in the development of PET ligands; his work led to the finding of the first human PET tracer for the SV2A receptor. In 2014, he joined Boehringer Ingelheim as project leader in the Medicinal Chemistry department at Biberach an der Riss in Germany, leading CNS projects for various indications from early stages to clinical candidate selection. Since 2017, he is leading the opnMe.com initiative and was appointed head of Open Science Group of Boehringer Ingelheim in 2022 overseeing most of the open innovation initiatives of the company from the opnMe.com website to the coordination of the Public-Private-Partnerships funded under IHI. He received various awards at UCB as the best youngest scientist and later for the most innovative scientist of the company and at Boehringer Ingelheim with the AAI award for the opnMe.com launch in 2018, the R&D award for Germany in 2019 and the Lighthouse award in 2021.