Sitta Sittampalam, PhD, MS

Dr. Sittampalam is a Senior Advisor to the director at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA. He joined NCATS in 2011 as Project Manager for The Rare & Neglected Diseases (TRND) Program. In his current position works closely with NCATS director and senior administration in identifying and implementing public-private partnerships with academia, government and pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations internationally.   He spent ~23 years in discovery and development of biotherapeutics and small molecule drugs at Eli Lilly & Co, Indianapolis, IN., followed by 4 years as tenured professor of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics at the University of Kansas Medical Center. During his tenure, he also served as the Deputy Director of the Institute of Advancing Medical Innovations (IAMI) focused on therapeutic development for commercialization. He has served as a reviewer in NIH and other scientific grant review panels and is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Assay Guidance Manual (NLM/NCBI eBook) and serves in the scientific advisory board of Science Translational Medicine. Dr. Sittampalam was the past President (2003-2004) and a member of the Board of Directors (1997-2000) at the Society for Biomolecular Screening (Currently Society for Laboratory Automation & Screening, SLAS). He is the recipient of many teaching awards and NCATS/NIH Director’s Awards for scientific collaborations in the USA and Japan.  

Dr. Sittampalam’s graduate and post-doctoral training was in bioanalytical chemistry and immunochemistry at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. He has ~ 50 peer-reviewed publications and over 350 invited seminars (nationally and internationally), short courses and lectures on a variety of topics in drug discovery, assay development, tissue engineering, High Throughput Screening (HTS) and lead optimization.