Simon Mackay is the Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Strathclyde, and has 30 years of research experience in drug discovery and development. He is a graduate of the University of Bath (BPharm (Hons); 1984) and the University of Manchester (PhD Medicinal Chemistry; 1990). His primary interest is cancer drug discovery and he is the Principal Investigator of a programme focused on developing therapeutic interventions to treat prostate and colorectal cancers. The project was initiated by £4.8M funding from Cancer Research UK/Prostate Cancer UK and more recently by MRC-DPFS (£2.59M). Two patents covering the IKKα inhibitor series from this programme have recently been filed. He has led a number of industry-funded drug discovery projects, including one in partnership with Gene Solutions UK focused on mitochondrial genomic targets, which has received significant investment (£4.7M). He is currently a co-director of TargoPep, a registered commercial entity in the process of raising investment to spin-out. He is a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. He was appointed as a panel member for the UK Research Excellence Framework assessments in 2014 and 2021 to evaluate research from 91 Higher Education Institutes covering drug discovery and development, medicinal chemistry, phytochemistry, pharmaceutics, pharmaceutical analysis, and nanotechnology.