An award-winning researcher, educator, scientific executive, and presenter, Lesley Anne Mathews, PhD, with a Master of Science in secondary education and teaching in biology, possesses more than 23 years of professional experience, culminating in her present role as the scientific director of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS). Since 2023, she has maintained responsibility for providing strategic leadership initiatives, coordinating the scientific content and delivery of educational sessions, and assembling appropriate personnel for the company’s classes, courses, and webinars. In addition to these duties, Dr. Mathews oversees the location and scouting of the SLAS trade shows and manages two of its affiliated peer-reviewed journals, SLAS Discovery and SLAS Technology. Moreover, she is responsible for serving as the acting scientific liaison and traveling across the nation and abroad to cultivate extensive knowledge of other processes and innovations in the field.
Earlier in her career, Dr. Mathews served with the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University between 2020 and 2023 as coordinator of communications and culture for the Center for the Development of Therapeutics and the associate director of cellular pharmacology. She also thrived as a senior group leader for translational pharmacology. Sharing her knowledge, Dr. Mathews was an adjunct faculty with the Office of Science Education at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a research scientist with the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Further, she served with Novartis between 2014 and 2020 as an investigator II in oncology and a principal scientist II in oncology and molecular pharmacology. Notably, during her tenure with the organization, she delivered a compound, LXH254, to potentially treat melanoma in patients.
Prior to embarking on her career, Dr. Mathews pursued a formal education at Clark University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in biology-chemistry in 2003. She then received a Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, she served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Cancer Institute, and in 2020, she received her Master of Science from Lesley University.
With more than 45 publications to her credit, Dr. Mathews is a prolific researcher and has accrued large audiences with her prowess in public speaking. To wit, she presented at SLAS conferences and exhibitions in 2013 and 2015 and completed a presentation at a TEDx event in 2022. Revered for her knowledge of laboratory science – including microorganisms, vaccines, cancer biology and therapeutics, and robotics – she has been honored repeatedly. To this end, she accepted the Kelly Government Solutions Award for Combination Matrix Screening in 2012 and the NIH Directors Award in 2013. In 2015, she received the Diversity and Inclusion Award from Novartis. In the coming years, Dr. Mathews endeavors to serve in an administrative role at a university to expand the reach of her expertise.
