Rod Hubbard’s current role at Vernalis is coordinating major funded collaborations. He is recognised as an international leader in the development and promotion of fragment-based discovery which exploits a scientific reputation built on nearly 40 years of academic and commercial research (h-index of 62, 24,000 citations). He was a founding SAB member of RiboTargets in 1997 before joining what became Vernalis in 2001 to establish protein structure based discovery alongside retention of his chair at York with research in chemical biology and industrial biotechnology.