Prof David Winkler
Professor David Winkler
Senior Associate
Prof David Winkler has an unusually broad formal training in chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, and radioastronomy. He is a Professor of Biochemistry & Genetics at La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science at La Trobe University, an adjunct Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Monash Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, a visiting Professor in Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham, and a Fellow in evolutionary robotics at CSIRO Data61.
He previously spent over 30 years at CSIRO researching the application of computational chemistry, AI, and machine learning methods to the design of drugs, agrochemicals, nanomaterials, and biomaterials. He has authored over 250 refereed journal articles and book chapters and is an inventor on 25 patents.
He has won several prestigious awards including the CSIRO Medal for Business Excellence, a Distinguished Fellowship and Adrien Albert award for contributions to medicinal chemistry from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI), the Herman Skolnik award for excellence in cheminformatics from the American Chemical Institute, and a Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) Distinguished Fellowship in bioengineering.
He is past President of the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies (FACS) and the Asian Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (AFMC), umbrella organizations representing chemists and medicinal chemistry in the Asia-Pacific Region. He has also served on the Boards of the RACI and Science and Technology Australia, the National Committee for Chemistry of the Australian Academy of Science, and an IUPAC committee on chemical nomenclature.
He has had substantial experience in writing technical papers, reports to industrial partners, applications for EU Horizon 2020, Marie Curie and COST Action funding, and ARC Discovery, LIEF, Linkage, and ONI grants.