David B. Smith, Ph.D., has been our Head of Chemical Operations since August 2018. In this position, Dr. Smith serves as a member of our Senior Leadership Team and is responsible for all chemistry related functions of the company at our South San Francisco location, including basic and applied chemical research in the areas of Process, Analytical, Nucleos(t)ide and Oligonucleotide Medicinal Chemistry and all related chemical outsourcing efforts. He is also responsible for the coordination and management of Aligos Intellectual Property across our sites. From May 2015 to August 2018, he served as Vice President at Janssen Pharmaceuticals and was the Global Disease Area Stronghold Leader for Hepatology in the Infectious Diseases Therapy Area. From February 2010 to April 2015 he held positions as Associate Director, Director and Senior Director of Product Development at Alios and Janssen. Dr. Smith started his industrial career as an Associate Research Scientist at Syntex in 1991, where he held positions as Research Scientist and Research Scientist II. Following the acquisition of Syntex by Roche in 1995, he continued in this role rising to Principal Research Scientist in 1998, a position he held until February 2010. During the period from 1993 to 2000, while at Syntex and Roche, he held a simultaneous annual position during winter quarter as Consulting Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, teaching a Special Topics course in Organic Chemistry. Dr. Smith was an NIH post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University from 1989 through 1991. He earned his BS in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1984, graduating with highest honors. His graduate work was initiated at Yale University, where he earned the MS and MPhil degrees in 1988, and he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1989. Dr. Smith has been a Medicinal Chemist, Project Team Lead Chemist, Discovery Team Leader and Development Team Leader and has worked in the area of Infectious Diseases for over 20 years, helping to advance multiple small molecule, nucleos(t)ide and oligonucleotide drug candidates into clinical trials. He is a co-inventor on 75 issued US patents and a co-author on more than 45 peer reviewed scientific publications.