Maria-Jesus Blanco is a highly experienced medicinal chemist focused on bringing meaningful medicines to patients. She is currently Head of Chemistry at Sage Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. Previously, she was Director of Discovery Chemistry Research & Technologies at Eli Lilly and member of the Discovery Chemistry management team. She has been working in drug discovery and development for >20 years, playing leadership and strategic roles in Neuroscience as well as emerging fields of drug discovery as chemical biology, protein-protein interactions, new chemical modalities and translational research. Maria was part of the team that discovered Reyvow (Lasmiditan, a selective 5-HT1F compound for migraine which obtained FDA approval in 2019) and Bevenopran (an opioid antagonist that reached phase 3). She has actively contributed to the delivery of 12 compounds to clinical studies. Maria obtained her Bachelor and Ph.D. degree in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She held postdoctoral positions at MIT with Prof. Masamune and University of Strasbourg, France with Nobel Laureate Prof. Sauvage before joining Lilly headquarters in Indianapolis. Maria has >80 scientific publications, presentations, patent and patent applications. Maria has been elected as the 2020 industrial Vice-Chair of the National Medicinal Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).