Dr Wilma Keighley is head of Lead Discovery Technologies at Pfizer’s UK research and development facility at Sandwich in Kent. Her team is responsible for all aspects of compound stewardship for both the dry and liquid files, for compound processing and reformatting, conduct of high and ultra high throughput screening, and for support and management of the data associated with compounds and with screening.
Dr Keighley has a background in Pharmacology, obtaining her degrees from Glasgow and Southampton Universities. She carried out postdoctoral research in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Southampton University, UK, funded by the Parkinson’s Disease Society and with Professor Stephen Thesleff at the Institute Farmakologiska, Lund University, Sweden before joining British American Tobacco Co Ltd as a research scientist. Several years later, Wilma joined Pfizer spending time in preclinical safety and drug candidate support, and in the cardiovascular therapeutic zone, before transferring to the New Leads team specialising in support for automated screening. Over the past eight years this team has grown to provide engineering, automation and data support for all compound management and plate based screening at the Sandwich site.
Dr Keighley is married with two teenage
daughters.