Erin Duffy
Former Chief Scientific Officer and Research Site Head, Melinta Therapeutics
Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is the Chief Scientific Officer and Research Site Head at Melinta Therapeutics, responsible for translating the company’s Nobel Prize-winning crystallography ribosome modeling into the discovery and early-stage development of novel antibiotic candidates. She joined the company in 2002 and has become one of the world’s leading experts on the structure and function of the bacterial ribosome and the interaction of antibiotics with their ribosomal targets.
Erin has led Melinta’s ESKAPE Pathogen Program from its infancy and has been instrumental in advancing the platform while also contributing to the development programs for other medication candidates. The ESKAPE Pathogen Program is Melinta’s most advanced preclinical initiative, focused on using a discrete, novel binding site within the bacterial ribosome to design and develop completely new classes of antibiotics to treat some of the deadliest multi-drug resistant Gram-positive and Gram-negative infections.
Prior to joining Melinta, Erin served as associate director of innovative discovery technologies at Achillion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. She began her scientific career as a computational chemist with Pfizer Global Research and Development in Groton, Connecticut.
She is a director of CURE (Connecticut United for Research Excellence) and formerly was a director of AWG (Antimicrobials Working Group).
Erin trained at Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in physical-organic chemistry and was a Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellow. She holds a B.S. in chemistry from Wheeling Jesuit University.