Dr. Alexei Pushechnikov has over 25 years of experience in medicinal chemistry and biomedical research with emphasis on early drug discovery. Throughout his career he successfully led integrated discovery programs as well as being a prolific academic researcher exploiting RNA molecules and epitranscriptomic regulators as drug targets for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. His achievements related to various aspects of the drug discovery process are reflected in over 40 peer-reviewed publications and patents. His key area of expertise in medicinal chemistry is an application of computational methods, i.e. chemoinformatic, bioinformatic, big/large data mining, machine learning & AI, QSAR, ligand- and structure-based CADD for the de novo design of small molecules.