Hi Reddit, I am currently CSO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, CEO of Phoenix Nest, CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc and CSO of the Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation and I am on the Editorial Board of Pharmaceutical Research. I am a graduate (MSc, PhD, DSc) of the University of Aberdeen. I have spent 20 years working in the USA, first as a postdoc at Eli Lilly, then as a senior scientist at Pfizer and Lilly before joining smaller start-up companies. I then went on to co-found and found two rare and neglected disease companies. My background is in clinical pharmacology, with an interest in understanding drug-drug reactions and toxicology. I quickly moved from doing bench work to learning how to use computational approaches to make predictions that could help drug discovery. Over the years I have collaborated with different academics and companies to build models that help predict how compounds bind to enzymes, transporters, ion channels and receptors. As the datasets have grown I have applied different machine learning approaches. My work in the last 8 years has brought me into working on neglected diseases like tuberculosis and rare diseases such as Sanfilippo syndrome and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Again collaborations are central to what I do. Virtually everything I work on is funded by a grant whether from the NIH, EU or others so even though I am not working in a university I am constantly working on small business or other grants. Most recently my work has led to projects and collaborations on the Ebola and Zika viruses. All of this has been published openly and I am an advocate of open access publishing as well as using social media to publicize science. I believe it’s important for scientists to use tools like Twitter to tell the world about their work, conferences they are attending and publications. I will be back at 11 am ET (8 am PT) to answer your questions on rare diseases, science collaborations, and my experience doing science outside of academia.