Ruben Abagyan got his PhD in biophysics from the Moscow State University and his tenure in biochemistry and mathematics from New York University and the Courant Institute of Mathematics. He was a scientist at EMBL, Heidelberg, a founder of Molsoft, a Director of Computational Sciences at the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomics, and a Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla  before joining the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UCSD. His lab develops and applies methods for molecular modeling, structure based discovery and optimization of drug candidates, target identification, large scale bio- and chemo-informatics.