Semantic Data Europe 2025

Christian Baber is a chemist by training and holds undergraduate and PhD degrees in computational chemistry with a focus on AI techniques to assess the synthetic accessibility of de novo design compounds.

Christian continued this work with a post-doctoral fellowship on the automated design of targeted combinatorial libraries at the Department of Knowledge Engineering, Osaka University, Japan before moving into industry initially as a computational chemist and cheminformatician.

Christian has a wide breadth of R&D experience across companies ranging from startups to large pharma and diverse therapeutic areas with a focus on informatics and predictive modeling for drug discovery but has also managed development systems and lab & automation teams including compound management and high-throughput purification. Most recently, after spending the previous 6 years leading Scientific Computing & Informatics and R&D IT at Shire & Takeda, Christian led the global Scientific & Pharmaceutical Data, Informatics and Systems function in Janssen R&D.

In addition to his day job, Christian sits on several industry advisory boards, and has been a Director of the Pharmaceutical R&D Information Systems Management Executive (PRISME) forum and chair of the Finance sub-committee of the Pistoia Alliance Board of Directors.