Dr. Barbara Slusher

Barbara Slusher, Ph.D., MAS, is Professor of Neurology (primary), Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Medicine and Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Director of Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery (https://drugdiscovery.jhu.edu/).
Dr. Slusher received her undergraduate degree from Dickinson College where she graduated valedictorian, majoring in Chemistry. She received her Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences from John Hopkins School of Medicine while simultaneously earning her Master’s degree in Administrative Science from the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business (formerly the Hopkins’ School of Continuing Studies).
Before joining Johns Hopkins in 2010, Dr. Slusher spent 18 years in the pharmaceutical industry, including several years at the level of Senior Vice President of Research and Translational Development. She has extensive experience in drug discovery through early clinical development and was involved in the successful development, launch and/or post marketing support of several branded medicines including SeroquelTM, AloxiTM, DacogenTM, LucedraTM.
At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Slusher leads the largest integrated drug discovery program on campus with a veteran team of medicinal chemists, assay developers, pharmacologists, toxicologists, and pharmacokinetics/drug metabolism experts. The team is engaged in identifying novel drug targets arising from the faculty’s research and translating them into new drug therapies for clinical development.
Dr. Slusher has published over 190 scientific articles and is the inventor on 80 patents and applications. She has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings and has served on the board or as a scientific consultant of multiple biotechnology companies. She is a co-founder of Cerecor, a CNS-focused biopharma company in Baltimore (www.cerecor.com/) and recently founded Dracen Pharmaceuticals focused on immuno-metabolism. She also founded and is leading the first-ever International Consortium of Academic Drug Discovery (www.addconsortium.org) with over 150 university-led translational centers and 1500 members in an effort to coordinate and enhance academic drug discovery efforts.