Stephanie Florio, PhD

Senior Scientist

Stephanie joined the TB Drug Discovery Group at IDRI in 2009 to return to the work of small molecule drug discovery in Tuberculosis after two and one-half years at Amgen, a world leader in biotechnology.
 
Dr. Florio was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Texas. She received her B.S. degree in Biology from Austin College in Sherman, Texas. After 2 years of working in electrophysiology and patch clamping at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas, she entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology. In graduate school, she studied with Dr. Joe Beavo, expressing and characterizing the function of a unique subunit of phosphodiesterase 6 (PDE6), the PDE responsible for visual transduction. 
 
After a brief post-doctoral fellowship studying protein signaling and translocation in T-cells, she quickly moved into the world of drug development. Stephanie has over 12 years experience in small molecule drug development working first in assay development (at MDS) then working in and leading projects from discovery through exploratory chemistry and early preclinical validation spanning disease areas as diverse as Herpes and chronic neuropathic pain (at ICOS Corporation). 
 

After spending a few years at Amgen developing scientific education programs for the R&D staff, Stephanie is thrilled to be back in the lab working to find new treatments for Tuberculosis.