During the last two decades Dr. Kocis has been involved in drug discovery in cancer, immunodeficiencies, asthma and provided drug lead discovery leadership at Hoechst-Marion-Roussell, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and Astra-Zeneca, lately as Global Head of Exploratory Chemistry, Discovery Enabling Capabilities & Sciences, AstraZeneca. Previously, also at AstraZeneca he served as Associate Director of Global Enabling Science & Technologies.

Dr. Kocis is one of the pioneers of combinatorial chemistry field. He helped to build a new biotech’s Selectide combinatorial chemistry and technology in Tucson, Arizona, in the early 90’s. In the mid 90’s he co-build the US Chemical Technologies group at Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and co-developed a novel combinatorial chemistry that was industrialized within the Zeneca’s International Drug Lead Discovery (US-UK axis) as a part of modern medicinal chemistry. He is a recipient of R&D Director’s Award for Creativity and Innovation, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, a recipient of Henry Christian Award for Excellence in Research by Merck.

Dr. Kocis serves as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Current Drug Discovery Technologies. He is on the editorial board of several journals including Drugs of the Future and on the Scientific Advisory Board of Cambridge Healthtech Institute and several other companies. Dr. Kocis is the author or coauthor of numerous scientific papers, book chapters and patents. His research interest is the multidimensional challenges of drug discovery, modern medicinal chemistry, cheminformatics, chemical and biology space mapping, data/network visualization, and a study of complex systems including projection into the business world