Dr. Shaun R. Stauffer directs the Cleveland Clinic Center for Therapeutics Discovery (C3TD). He obtained his PhD in organic chemistry in 1999 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Dr. John Katzenellenbogen and did post-doctoral studies at Yale University with Dr. John Hartwig before joining Merck & Co. in 2001. While at Merck, Dr. Stauffer worked on drug discovery teams in several therapeutic areas, including Alzheimer’s disease, pain, and cardiovascular disease. In 2008 Dr. Stauffer was recruited to Vanderbilt University where he built and led several drug discovery programs, including industry and NIH sponsored neuroscience and cancer drug discovery projects.
Dr. Stauffer arrived at the Cleveland Clinic in spring of 2018 to lead and build the newly formed C3TD to help investigators at the Cleveland Clinic de-risk and develop innovative hypotheses to help create new medicines for patients. Dr. Stauffer’s research interests lie in catalysis and reaction discovery as a tool towards enabling problem-solving in medicinal chemistry and lead generation for new drug target classes. His therapeutic and research interests are broad and include cancer drug discovery, neurodegenerative diseases, epigenetics, metabolomics, allosteric modulators, and structure-based design.