Hanneke Jansen

Johanna Maria "Hanneke" Jansen is a computational chemist working at Novartis on multiple drug targets. She previously worked at Astra and at Chiron Corporation.^[1]

Johanna M. Jansen, Ph.D.
Other names	Hanneke
Alma mater	Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Uppsala University
Scientific career
Thesis	Three Dimensions in Drug Design: Probing the melatonin receptor
Website	https://www.novartis.com/our-science/postdoc-program/leadership/johanna-hanneke-jansen-phd

Education

Jansen received her doctoral degree from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) in 1995, studying computational medicinal chemistry. Her dissertation topic^[2] concerned 3D modeling of the melatonin receptor, including work on synthesizing and separating analytes^[3][4] to probe its chemistry. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Uppsala University in 1997. Her work there related to modeling receptor interactions^[5] of drug leads to judge their serotonergic or dopaminergic activities.

Research

Much of Jansen's oeuvre uses in silico methods to study receptor biology, drug design, and drug-protein interactions. An early study (2000) while she was employed at Chiron looked at conformations of the anti-cancer treatment Taxol in nonpolar environments.^[6]

In a 2012 commentary for Future Medicinal Chemistry, Jansen led a team of distinguished computational chemists in a call to action, namely that standardized data sets be used across the industry, and that sharing program code between groups at different companies and institutions should be mandated.^[7]

A 2017 open-access study in PLoS One related some of Novartis' work - spearheaded by Jansen - to study the oncogenic protein RAS through inhibitors that targeted its inactive conformations.^[8]

Volunteer service

Jansen has served the ACS division on Computers in Chemistry since at least 2007, holding multiple leadership positions.^[9][10] Outside of pharmaceutical work, she is perhaps best known as a co-Founder and Steering Committee member for the Teach-Discover-Treat initiative,^[11] which creates challenges for students and young professionals to design drugs against neglected diseases such as malaria or Trypanosoma using computational chemistry shared data sets and screens.

Awards

• 2012 - ACS ChemLuminary Award^{[citation needed]}
• 2011 - Fellow of the American Chemical Society^[12][13]