Matthew P. Jacobson, Ph.D., was an undergraduate at Stanford, earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at MIT, and then completed post-doctoral research at Oxford University and at Columbia University. He became a faculty member in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF in 2002, received tenure in 2007, and subsequently served as Director of the Graduate Group in Biophysics and then Chair of his department. Matt’s research interests are in the area of computational biophysics and computer-aided drug design, and he is the author of over 200 publications including a textbook and several patents. At UCSF, Matt received the NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and several School of Pharmacy teaching awards, and served on the editorial boards of 8 journals, including Biochemistry, PLoS Computational Biology, and Structure. Software written by Matt and his collaborators is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, and he served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Schrödinger, Inc. for 2 decades. Since 2011, he has co-founded 6 biotechnology companies, starting with Global Blood Therapeutics, which received accelerated FDA approval for voxelotor in 2019 and was acquired by Pfizer in 2022. His second company, Relay Therapeutics, has developed 4 drugs in clinical testing and is listed on NASDAQ. Matt is currently Professor Emeritus at UCSF but devotes most of his time to biotech entrepreneurship.
Matt’s scientific genealogy can be found here: PhDTree
The Jacobson Laboratory at UCSF 