Associate Director
Element Iowa City (JMI Laboratories)
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Ryan Arends, PhD, Associate Director, Element Iowa City (JMI Labs)
Dr. Arends completed his PhD and a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology at the University of Iowa. He began his antimicrobial research career in 2009 at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he was an integral member of the antimicrobial discovery team that progressed multiple scaffolds from HTS screening hits to lead optimization compounds. At Vertex, Dr. Arends was responsible for managing the site’s liquid handling robots, including their programming, user training, and preventive maintenance. Dr. Arends was also responsible for optimizing and performing bacterial growth inhibition assays to support medicinal chemistry efforts.
Dr. Arends joined JMI Laboratories as a Research Scientist in 2016 and was promoted to an Associate Director position in 2023. In addition to overseeing the production facility’s liquid handling systems, his responsibilities include drug development study designs, data analysis, publication generation, and managing high throughput screening campaigns for a variety of antibacterial and antifungal projects. Dr. Arends has authored or coauthored more than 20 microbiological publications in peer-reviewed journals.