Wendy Young

Wendy B. Young is an advisor at Google Ventures and a former senior vice president of small molecule drug discovery at Genentech.

Education Young received her B.S. and M.S. from Wake Forest University, working with Prof. Huw Davies. She was co-author on an early application of Davies' rhodium(II) carbenoid insertion - Cope rearrangement chemistry, leading to the total synthesis of three small tropane natural products. Young received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1993, working with Edward C. Taylor on heterocycles derived from natural pigments, one of which ultimately became pemetrexed (Alimta), an oncology treatment. In her postdoctoral fellowship with Samuel Danishefsky, Young was among one of a handful of groups in the mid-1990s to synthesize paclitaxel (Taxol), a highly-oxygenated terpenoid natural product used to treat cancer.

Career Despite multiple employment offers on the East Coast of the United States, such as kallikrein and Factors VIIa and IXa. She was recruited to Genentech in 2006, and in 2018 was promoted to Senior Vice President of Small Molecule drug discovery. Her team developed fenebrutinib, currently in Phase II clinical trials for several autoimmune disorders. In 2023, she became an advisor at Google Ventures.

Awards 2020 - ACS Earle B. Barnes Award in Chemical Management 2020 - Wake Forest Distinguished Alumni Award 2018 - ACS Fellow 2018 - William S. Johnson Symposium, Stanford University 2017 - Elected Chair of ACS Medicinal Chemistry Division 2015 - "Most Influential Woman of 2015" - San Francisco Business Times 1995 - American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship 1993 - H.W. Dodds Top Thesis Award, Princeton University