Avner Schlessinger

Dr. Avner Schlessinger is the Dr. Amy and James Elster Professor of Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). He is the Director of the AI Small Molecule Drug Discovery Center at ISMMS, and Co-Director of the Disease Mechanisms and Therapeutics (DMT) Training Area in the Mount Sinai Graduate Program. Dr. Schlessinger graduated from Tel Aviv University with a BSc in Biology and Chemistry and earned his PhD in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University. During his PhD, he developed methods for predicting protein structure and function using advanced machine-learning approaches, including artificial neural networks. Following his graduate studies, Dr. Schlessinger received an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF, where he established methods for structure-based drug design and developed tool compounds for membrane proteins. In 2013, he joined the faculty at Mount Sinai, and in 2023, he was promoted to full Professor with tenure. The overall goal of Dr. Schlessinger’s lab is to improve and automate the drug discovery process by integrating approaches in computational chemistry and artificial intelligence, and applying these methods to characterize disease pathways. His lab publishes in the areas of chemical biology, bioinformatics, and drug discovery, as well as in precision medicine and pharmacogenomics. Dr. Schlessinger serves on the Editorial Boards of PLOS Computational Biology and Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, as well as on the Advisory Board of various biotechnology companies and international consortia.