Dr. Kesicki is an organic chemist by training and has over 12 years of experience in small-molecule drug discovery. He was a co-founder of the not-for-profit Afya World Medicines that merged into IDRI in 2008 to focus on the discovery of new treatments for tuberculosis. Prior to this, he spent 9 years at Icos Corp. in Bothell, WA and was involved in several medicinal chemistry projects that discovered compounds that are currently in human testing. He is an inventor on over 20 patents in 5 target areas, an author on numerous peer-reviewed articles, and has been an invited speaker at several national meetings. He received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego.