Dr. Han (May) has over 20 years of experience in drug discovery and development. May’s experience includes being both a drug program manager and a scientific team lead, encompassing more than 20 programs across a variety of drug modalities, including small molecule, complex biologics, cell therapies. She worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, AVEO and Novartis in positions of increasing responsibility targeting different diseases areas; she has an especially deep scientific understanding across oncology and metabolic diseases. May is known for driving scientific rigor on all the teams she involved, tirelessly seeking the fundamental biological mechanism and her pragmatic and integrated approach to solve varied problems encountered in drug discovery.
From 2013 until 2021 May served as a Team Leader, Global Project Manager, and Director roles while at the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research. At Novartis she led ~20 drug discovery programs and hematologic cancer portfolio as program manager. Additionally, she supervised a large group of experienced drug developers with over 100 years of drug development experience, who manage a large portfolio of over 30 complex clinical stage programs. From 2003 to 2013 May served as a Program Leader, Director at AVEO, she led an antibody program from inception to completion of randomized Phase 2 study with hands-on experience of nearly all aspects of drug development. She led multiple biotech-pharma collaborations from both biotech and pharma sides, with transactions in excess of $1 billion dollars.
May holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, B.S. in Biochemistry from Beijing University, PR China. Prior to joining the pharmaceutical industry, May was a CH Revson Fellow at Rockefeller University in the lab of Dr. Thomas Sakmar and HH Whitney fellow at Yale in the lab of Dr. Paul Sigler.