A veteran chemist with extensive leadership experience who is fluent in medicinal, computational and synthetic chemistry.

Donna Romero brings over 25 years of broad leadership experience at biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies. Prior to joining ROME, she was president of Pharma-Vation Consulting, LLC, which provides medicinal and synthetic chemistry expertise to biotechnology companies, venture capital firms and the NINDS NIH Blueprint Therapeutics for Neuroscience Research (BPN). For nearly a decade, she has worked with numerous biotechnology companies such as Nimbus Therapeutics, Tetra Therapeutics, Vincere Biosciences and Centaurus Therapeutics, where she has led drug discovery and preclinical development projects. Prior to that, Donna held the position of senior director of medicinal chemistry at Pfizer and director of medicinal chemistry at Pharmacia. She has broad experience in project strategy, evaluation, resourcing and cross-disciplinary discovery management. She discovered Rescriptor®, a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor marketed for treating AIDS, has published 48 peer-reviewed papers, and is an inventor on many patents. Donna earned her B.S. in chemistry and computer science at Emory University and her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.