Michelle R. Arkin

Michelle R. Arkin is an American chemical biologist who is the Thomas William and Frederick John MacWilliam Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Education
Arkin obtained her B.A. degree in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology with Jacqueline Barton. Later, Arkin held a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech under the mentorship of James A. Wells.

Career
Arkin was a founding scientist at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover and develop the anti-inflammatory drug lifitigrast (developed by SARcode/Shire), and anti-cancer experimental therapeutic vosaroxin (Sunesis).

Arkin is the Thomas William and Frederick John MacWilliam Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her lab at UCSF focuses on developing methodologies and functional molecules that target undruggable proteins, including challenging targets in diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. Her lab also studies the chemical biology of protein-protein interaction networks. Arkin was appointed as the Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF in early 2021. Arkin is the Director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC) at UCSF, a center that collaborates with academics, pharmaceutical companies, and government labs to develop drug leads and chemical probes that address unmet medical needs. Arkin is an investigator in the UCSF Cancer Center, the Bakar Aging Research Institute, and the Rainwater Foundation's Tau Consortium.

She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Buck Institute for Research in Aging. She is involved with the academic drug discovery community, as Director and former President of the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, editor of the National Institutes of Health Assay Guidance Manual, and Fellow and former Director of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening. Arkin is a cofounder and Director of Ambagon Therapeutics and cofounder of Elgia Therapeutics.