Lingling Shen

Lingling Shen is an accomplished computational scientist and educator with over 17 years of experience at the forefront of data science, cheminformatics, and drug discovery. She currently serves as Associate Director of Data Science at Novartis, where she plays a strategic role in advancing AI/ML-driven methodologies for early-stage drug discovery, particularly in the area of targeted protein degradation (TPD) and ultra-scale chemical space exploration.
At Novartis, Lingling contributes to the Computational Sciences Council, fostering collaborations between academia and internal R&D teams to accelerate scientific innovation. Her work spans cutting-edge domains such as 3D generative chemistry, co-folding models, and active learning, with a strong emphasis on open-source AI tools to support hit prioritization and structure-based drug design.
Previously, Lingling held positions in Scientific Informatics at both the Cambridge (MA) and Shanghai sites of Novartis, and earlier in her career worked as a Senior Scientist in CADD at Pfizer, where she focused on computational chemistry and chemoinformatics.
In addition to her industry leadership, Lingling is also an Adjunct Professor at Brandeis University, where she teaches structural bioinformatics, Python, and sequence analysis, contributing to the training of the next generation of computational biologists and data scientists.