Dr. LoGrasso is a professor in the Molecular Therapeutics Department and senior director of drug discovery within The Scripps Research Institute, where he has been since 2005. Prior to joining Scripps, Dr. LoGrasso was a program officer at NIGMS and had responsibility for funding a $50MM research portfolio in the areas of chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology.

In his last industrial position, Dr. LoGrasso was the director of pre-clinical research and development at Avera Pharmaceuticals. In this role, he placed two compounds into Phase II clinical development for CNS disorders. Prior to Avera, he was a research fellow at Merck Research Laboratories for nearly nine years, working in the areas of inflammation and neuroscience. In this capacity he was responsible for evaluation of pre-clinical drug candidates and novel target discovery targets. His research focus was on MAP-kinase signal transduction pathways and associated mechanistic enzymology, inhibitor characterization, and structure-function relationships.