Personal profile

CV

Education
2006: Ph.D. in Medicine, Uppsala University (for PhD-age subtract 8 mo. parental leave)
2003: M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Uppsala University

Positions
2022-: Part-time position at Kvantify A/S
2019-: Professor in Computational Receptor Biology, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology (DDP) and Center for Health Data Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH)
2011-: Associate Professor and Group Leader, DDP
2008-11: Postdoc, DDP
2007-08: Postdoc, GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, UK
2006-08: Postdoc, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, UK (2nd year 25%)

Awards & honors
2022 Highly cited researcher, top 1% in cross-field, Clarivate

2022 Second best structure model in global competition, ‘GPCR Dock’ (NPY1)
2021 Lars Arge prize for big data from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
2019 Admitted to the UCPH Forward Talent Program (only 24 seats for the entire University)
2019: Lundbeck Foundation Ascending Investigator (DKK 5M)
2018: Novo Nordisk Foundation Hallas-Møller Ascending Investigator (DKK 10M)
2015: ERC Starting Grant (€ 1.5M)
2014: Lundbeck Foundation Fellow (DKK 10M)
2013: 1st place in the international GPCR Dock competition (best 5-HT1B receptor model)
2005: First-authored the most downloaded article of the year in BBA - General Subjects

Leadership
International
2013-: Head of GPCRdb – the main online research infrastructure in the GPCR field
2019-20, 2014-17 Management Committee member, EU COST Actions ‘ERNEST & ‘GLISTEN
Institutional
The first two at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences and the remaining at DDP.
2020-: Steering group member in the Center for Health Data Science
2018-20: Committee member of the Data Science Lab
2019-: Head of the Research Cluster for GPCR function and drug discovery
2019-: Head of a Research leadership forum (part of Career and skills development forum)
2018-: Chairperson of a Data Science Core Team
2016-: Chairperson, 4 PhD Assessment Committees (+1 abroad)
2018: Member of Strategy and reorganisation committees
2017: Member of Career and recruitment work group
Training
2022 EMBO Solutions – Laboratory Leadership for Group Leaders (3 days)
2020 EMBO Solutions course on negotiation for scientists
2019 Talent Programme ‘UPCH Forward’ (10 mo., led by previous leaders of Centres of Excellence)
2016- Mentoring by three leaders of centres in drug discovery, structural biology or data science
2016 Leadership coaching by Mobilize Strategy Consulting (5 half-day sessions, 1 book)
2012 Diploma in Research Management, CBS Executive (9 days, 2 books)

Selected scientific and academic activities
2015-: Grant evaluator for 5 Foundation/councils, e.g. ETH Zurich Research Commission and ERC
2014-: Corresponding member, Intl. Union of Pharmacology Nomenclature Committee
2012-: Evaluated 5 application for foundations and councils, incl. ERC, NWO, FWO,
2007-: Invited speaker at >30 international conferences
2007-: Peer-reviewer for 23 intl. journals (including 4 Nature articles)
2016-19: Editor of Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group)
2011/15 Editor of special issues in Current Opinion in Pharmacology / Medicinal Chemistry

Research education

2008-: ~168 h/year teaching of MSc, PhD and industry professionals (if including MSc supervision)
2011- Main supervisor of (current/alumni): PhD (2/8), Postdocs (4/6) & ass prof (1/3)
Pedagogic training
2012: 2-day PhD supervision course
2008: 250 h university pedagogy course “Higher education teaching” (Dk: Adjunktpædagogikum)

Short presentation

Biography
David Gloriam started his research career at Uppsala University where he in 2006 received a PhD degree for the bioinformatic discovery of 24 human receptors and the overall receptor repertoires in dog, mouse, rat and chicken. In 2006-7, he was at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) – Bioinformatics Institute where he developed a global protein informatics standard and data exchange format for protein affinity reagents. In 2007-2008, he made another postdoc at GlaxoSmithKline where he conducted computational drug design and developed chemogenomic methods for ligand/drug discovery. Since late 2008, he has been at the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen where his research spans database development, data science and experimental structural biology. In 2019, he became the leader of a Departmental Cluster for GPCR Function and Drug Discovery and in 2020 he joined the steering committee of a Faculty Center for Health Data Science.

He has been awarded a Lundbeck Foundation Fellowship (2014), ERC Starting Grant (2015), Novo Nordisk Foundation Hallas-Møller Ascending Investigator (2018) and Lundbeck Foundation Ascending Investigator (2019). In 2013, he won a global structure modelling competition, GPCR Dock (best apo serotonin 5-HT1B receptor model). In 2013, he was appointed the new leader of his field’s main database, GPCRdb.org, which has evolved to an indispensable research infrastructure serving over 5,000 multidisciplinary scientists each month. In 2017, the Chemical & Engineering News magazine of the American Chemical Society looked back on the past decade of GPCR research featuring GPCRdb along with his landmark publication on receptor drugs, targets and disease indications in Nat Rev Drug Discov (>1,600 citations in Google Scholar). In 2019, he received a full Professorship in Computational Receptor Biology through a rare and exclusive personal calling and was selected for the UCPH Forward Talent Program at the University of Copenhagen. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lars Arge prize for big data from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters

Research direction
I consolidate my research on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) – which mediate the effects of 1/3rd (ref) of drugs and 2/3rd of hormones (ref). My group develops computational and data driven methods for interdisciplinary receptor research and drug discovery, spanning:
Biased signalling towards safer drugs and specific signalling probes: Mechanisms and resources to design drugs with higher potency and fewer side effects by steering the receptor signalling onto only beneficial cellular pathways. I recently released an online community Biased Signaling Atlas.
Computational drug design: Identification of druggable molecules for disease-relevant receptors and tool compounds to characterise understudied ‘orphan’ receptors or dissect GPCR signalling pathways.
Data science approaches to uncover receptor function: Discovery of physiological peptide hormones and determinants of receptor activation, effector G protein selectivity, genetic variants etc.
Experimental structural biology: Development of protein engineering tools combined with an in-house laboratory to determine drug-receptor structure complexes.
Online research infrastructure: GPCRdb resources integrating sequence-structure-function to offer reference data, analysis/visualisation, experiment design and data deposition upon publication.
Read more at the web sites of the Gloriam group and the Cluster for GPCR Function and Drug Discovery.

Bibliometrics
See Web of Science (requires subscription), Scopus and Google scholar.

Keywords

  • Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
  • Drug design
  • Computational Chemistry
  • Computational Modeling
  • Bioinformatics
  • Structural biology
  • Data analysis
  • Database
  • Pharmacology
  • Receptor pharmacology
  • data science

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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