Oliver Plettenburg

Oliver Plettenburg is Director of the Institute of Medicinal Chemistry at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Health in Munich and Professor for Medicinal Chemistry at Leibniz Universität Hannover. Previously he held various positions within the pharmaceutical industry, last as Head of Biosensors & Chemical Probes in Sanofi’s Diabetes Division. The group’s main responsibility was to support evaluation of validity of novel targets, provide tools to visualize pathologically relevant processes, to develop new methods to quantify important biomarkers and to explore new treatment options at the drug-device interface.
Oliver was with Sanofi for 14 years. Before joining the Diabetes Division he worked as a project leader in several medicinal chemistry projects in the area of Diabetes and Cardiovascular Diseases and was deeply involved in the Chemical Biology approach within Aventis.
After receiving his PhD in organic chemistry, he joined The Scripps Research Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, working in the group of Chi-Huey Wong on the total synthesis of glycosyl sphingosides.