Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

AI or deep learning is a buzzword in recent years. How it was applied and truly helped remained vague in drug discovery and drug development. This talk is going to cover the use of computer-aided techniques as well as the true AI aided process in the CNS disease.

Professor Yufeng Jane Tseng received her B.S. degree in Pharmacy from National Taiwan University in 1997. Prof. Tseng then received her Ph.D. degree in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2002, and was the recipient of the Charles Bell Award for Computational Chemistry in 2001. From 1998 to 2006, Prof. Tseng had worked as a Principal Molecular Modeling Software Developer at The Chem21 Group, Inc., in Lake Forest, USA. From 2004 to 2006, Prof. Tseng also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, USA. Prof. Tseng joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU) in 2006 as an Assistant Professor, and held a joint-appointment at the School of Pharmacy also at NTU.

Prof. Tseng has devoted 15 years of active service in education and continues to be a leader in computational chemistry and computer-aided drug design. Since 2009, she has founded and served as the Principal Investigator of Metabolomics Core Laboratory at NTU. Since 2010, Prof. Tseng has been organizing and chairing the Drug Discovery Symposium at the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meetings and continues her services at ACS to present. In 2014, she became a Professor at the Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, with the Department of Computer Science and Information, and at the School of Pharmacy. In 2015, Prof. Tseng was appointed the Director of Drug Research Center at NTU, and in 2016, she was appointed the associate director of the Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center at NTU. She was appointed as the associate chair of the department of Computer Science and Engineering at NTU in 2019.

As an outstanding faculty, Prof. Tseng received IBM Faculty Award (USA) in 2015 and Ching Kang Foundation Young Investigator Award (Taiwan) in 2016. And her continuous efforts in organizing the Drug Discovery Symposiums at America Chemical Society (ACS) National Meetings and leading the Teach-Discovery-Treat (TDT) Initiative for discovering novel treatments for neglected diseases, was awarded the ACS Innovation Award (USA) in 2012 and ACS Chemiluminary Award (USA) in 2013.

Prof. Tseng’s expertise in AI-assisted drug design and discovery has made rapid progress and showed promising clinical results in novel CNS drug. Prof. Tseng’s extraordinary effort in drug discovery was recognized with 12 prestigious awards: BIO Asia 2020 ‘Innovation of the year Award’(BioAsia, 2020), National Bio-Innovation Award (Taiwan, 2020), NTU EE Alumni Technology Innovation Award (Taiwan, 2020), Futuristic Breakthrough Technology Award (Taiwan, 2019), National Bio-Innovation Award (Taiwan, 2019), Novartis Venture Fund Mentorship Grantee (USA, 2016 and 2017), NTU EECS Academic Merit Award (Taiwan, 2017), National Bio-Innovation Award (Taiwan, 2016), Drug Repurposing Innovation Award (Taiwan, 2015), and NTU EECS Outstanding Research Contribution Award (Taiwan, 2013, 2021). In 2017, Prof. Tseng was appointed the Director of SPARK Taiwan, but quickly, she was also appointed the Chairman of Asia SPARK Regional Committee and Global SPARK Executive Committee in 2018.