Joshua Oluoch Odingo, PhD

Director, Chemistry

Dr. Odingo joined IDRI in 2007 as the Director of chemistry and is currently part of a team building small-molecule drug discovery platform at IDRI. His research is focused on discovery chemistry towards new medicines for treatment of tuberculosis. He is also conducting research towards the discovery of new vaccine adjuvants.

Dr. Odingo was born and grew up in the Western part of Kenya along the shores of Lake Victoria. He was educated in Kenya and received his BSc degree in Chemistry at the University of Nairobi in 1987. He moved to Columbia University, New York in 1989 and obtained a PhD degree in Organic Chemistry under the guidance of Professor Koji Nakanishi. He has many years of drug discovery research experience through medicinal chemistry research positions held as postdoctoral scientist at Genentech Inc. and later as scientist/group leader at ICOS Corporation. At Genentech Inc., his research focused on the development of new technologies for compound library synthesis. At ICOS, his research aimed to discover drugs for treatment of infectious, allergic and inflammatory diseases. He was a chemistry group leader for a number of projects including a phosphodiesterase (PDE4, Phase 2) inhibitor program and a prostaglandin D2 receptor antagonist program (preclinical).