Dominique Lesuisse received a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Louvain, Belgium in the lab of Léon Ghosez. She then spent 2 years at the University of Irvine, California in Larry Overman lab and 2 years at MIT in Glenn Berchtold’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow.  She then joined in 1987 a French Pharmaceutical company named Roussel Uclaf.  This company was repeatedly merged to become successively Hoechst Roussel, Hoechst Marion Roussel, Aventis and presently Sanofi-Aventis.  Dominique’s research interests primarily focus on drug design.  Some of the area of medicinal chemistry that she explored are steroid hormone biosynthesis inhibitors, nuclear receptor agonists and antagonists, protein-protein interaction inhibitors, protease and kinase inhibitors, within therapeutic area ranging from endocrinology, bone disease, anti-infectives, oncology and CNS.  She is presently head of medicinal chemistry in a department entitled ‘Aging’ and encompassing all pathologies related to aging (neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, pain, hearing loss, musculo-skeletal, …) in the Chilly-Mazarin center of Sanofi-Aventis.