Dr. Al-awar is an accomplished pharmaceutical executive with expertise spanning target discovery to lead identification and clinical candidate nomination. Dr. Al-awar had a 13-year career with Eli Lilly and Company. Hired as a senior organic chemist, Dr. Al-awar progressed through multiple positions of increasing breadth and responsibility, culminating as Head in the Route Selection Group, Chemical Product Research and Development at the Lilly Corporate Center in Indiana. Currently, Dr. Al-awar is a member of the leadership team at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), a collaborative research institute that conducts and enables high-impact translational cancer research. After joining the OICR in 2008, Dr. Al-awar established the Drug Discovery Program. The Drug Discovery Program’s purpose is to seek out and translate the most promising ideas from Ontario’s academic community into new therapeutic treatments for the benefit of cancer patients. Under Dr. Al-awar’s leadership, the group has grown to a team of more than 30 multi-disciplinary researchers who have identified and validated two promising new cancer targets, BCL6 and WDR5, invented and advanced lead drug candidates against each target, and, through the OICR’s investment and commercialization arm FACIT, entered into substantial pharmaceutical development partnerships. Dr. Al-awar earned her Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from North Carolina State University and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining Eli Lilly and Company.