Dr. Samy Meroueh is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a co-founder of Kovina Therapeutics.  He was previously Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Indiana University School of Medicine.  Dr. Meroueh received his PhD in the Department of Chemistry at Wayne State University in the laboratory of William L. Hase.  There, he explored and developed methods to model intermolecular forces that drive molecular recognition and ensuing chemical reactions in biological molecules. As a postdoc at the University of Notre Dame in the laboratory of Dr. Shahriar Mobashery, he was trained in bioorganic chemistry.  He was co-mentored by Dr. Jed Fisher, a medicinal chemist who had spent more than two decades in the pharmaceutical industry.  At Notre Dame, he developed mechanism-based covalent small-molecule enzyme inhibitors targeting matrix metalloproteinases, cathepsins, and beta-lactamases. In his laboratory at Indiana University, he developed small molecules that modulate the function of proteins that are considered undruggable, such as members of the RAS and Rho GTPase superfamily, transcription factors and co-activators such as Hippo pathway TEAD and YAP, and proteins involved in tight protein-protein interactions like the urokinase receptor or the HPV E6 oncogene.  Dr. Meroueh was the recipient of the American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant in cancer drug discovery.  His laboratory has been continuously funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.  Dr. Meroueh is a member of the Department of Veterans Affairs and Cancer Center at Illinois.