Board of Directors

Dr. H. Lee Noble

Founder and CEO, Noble Consulting

Mr. Noble recently retired from a 25 year career at Bayer Corp. For the last 8 years he served as President of that company's Polymer Division and Executive Vice President of the Corporation. During his tenure, the Division more than doubled sales to over $2 billion, completed 4 major acquisitions and completed a capital project of over $1.2 billion. For the past four years, he also served as Chairman of the Board of Deerfield Urethanes, a subsidiary of Bayer. Mr. Noble is currently CEO of Noble Consulting, specializing in Strategic Planning, Mergers and Acquisitions and Financing of Start-up Companies.

During the last 10 years, Mr. Noble has actively participated in a number of industry, civic, and charitable groups. He served as a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Society of the Plastics Industry, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Isocyanate Institute and member of the founding committee of the American Plastics Council and its Board of Directors. He continues to be an active member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Lifeswork of Western Pa (formerly the VRC), where he previously served two terms as Chairman of the Board. He was a founder of Pittsburgh Project for Employment of Persons with Disabilities (Project Freedom) and continues on their Board of Directors. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh Medical System (UPMC), Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and Pittsburgh Regional Alliance.

Dr. Thomas D'Ambra

Founder and CEO, Albany Molecular Research

Dr. D'Ambra received a B.A. in chemistry from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. in 1978, and a doctorate degree in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. After leaving MIT, he joined the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Sterling Winthrop, and over the next seven years he participated in drug research programs in the endocrine, cardiovascular and analgesic therapeutic areas. Dr. D'Ambra left Sterling in 1989 to join Coromed, Inc., another Albany company, as a co-founder, where he established the chemistry and biology departments. He left Coromed in the summer of 1991 and founded Albany Molecular Research, Inc. Dr. D'Ambra has been involved in many different facets of the growing business, including bench research scientist, scientific and business leader and business development functions.

Dr. Harold Meckler

Vice President Science and Technology, Albany Molecular Research

Since 2000, Dr. Meckler has led AMRI's Science & Technology department. This group helps to manage the AMRI IP portfolio, internal research projects, Scientific Information systems and the AMRI sample collection. Dr. Meckler joined AMRI in 1995 to head up the Chemical Development and cGMP Production Groups. Prior to that he worked at Telor Ophthalmic Pharmaceuticals (Wilmington, Massachusetts) and built their Organic Chemistry Department. In 1984, Dr. Meckler joined the Chemical Development Group of the CIBA Pharmaceuticals Division (Summit, New Jersey) where he focused on the process development, pilot plant scale up and cGMP production of a wide variety of compounds. Prior to that, Dr. Meckler worked in the Chemical Development Group of Sterling Winthrop (Rensselaer, New York). Dr. Meckler earned his Ph.D. in 1983 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Organic Process Research and Development.

Dr. Philip E. Yeske

President and CEO, Fluorous Technologies

Dr. Philip E. Yeske received a B.S. in Chemistry from Allegheny College in 1985 and a doctorate from Emory University in 1990 under the direction of Professor Albert Padwa. After working with Professor Dennis Curran at the University of Pittsburgh as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Yeske joined Bayer Corporation in 1991. There he held positions progressing from basic research to global account management over a 10-year period within the Coatings Raw Materials Business Group. He recently completed a 4-year marketing assignment at Bayer´s corporate headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany. Dr. Yeske has co-authored over 20 U.S. patents and was a co-winner of the prestigious "Otto Bayer Medallion" at Bayer in 1995.

Scientific Advisory Board

Professor Dennis P. Curran

Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board and Chief Scientific Advisor, University of Pittsburgh

Dennis P. Curran received his B.S. in 1975 from Boston College. His Ph.D. was granted from the University of Rochester in 1979 where he worked under Professor Andrew S. Kende. After a two year postdoctoral stay with Professor Barry M. Trost at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Curran joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1981. He now holds the ranks of Distinguished Service Professor and Bayer Professor of Chemistry, and is the American Editor of Tetrahedron: Asymmetry and Tetrahedron Letters. Among other awards, Dr Curran has received the American Chemical Society Cope Scholar Award (1988), and the Janssen Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis (1998). He currently the President-Elect of the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow. Dr. Curran has authored over 200 papers, six patents and one book, and is well known for his work at the interface of radical chemistry and organic synthesis. Dr. Curran is also a pioneer in the area of fluorous chemistry and the company is founded on the chemistry and technology that has emerged from his research group.

Dr. Alfred Bader

Founder and Former President and CEO of Aldrich and Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Companies

Alfred Bader obtained his B.Sc. in 1945 from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and moved then to Harvard, where he worked under Louis Fieser. He gained his PhD in 1950, and joined the Pittsburgh Plate Glass company as a research chemist.

About the same time, problems with the supply of organic research chemicals led Bader to start up the Aldrich Chemical Company, where he served from 1955 to 1991 as President and CEO of Aldrich and Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Companies. Throughout his scientific and business career, Bader gained many honors, among them 9 honorary doctorates. In 1998, Dr Bader received the American Chemical Society Award: "One of the Top 75 Distinguished Contributors to the Chemical Enterprise in the Last 75 Years".

Professor Peter Wipf

Director of the Combinatorial Chemistry Center, University of Pittsburgh

Peter Wipf was born in Aarau, Switzerland. He received his Chemistry Diploma in 1984 and his PhD in 1987 from the University of Zürich under the direction of Heinz Heimgartner and then joined Robert E. Ireland at the University of Virginia as a Swiss NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1990, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1995 and Professor in 1997. Peter Wipf's research interests are focused on the total synthesis of natural products, heterocyclic and organometallic chemistry. He has founded, and serves as the first Director of the Combinatorial Chemistry Center at the University of Pittsburgh that is involved in many collaborative projects in chemical biology.