Susan Froshauer, Ph.D. Susan has over 30 years of R & D experience in the pharmaceutical industry, most recently as founding CEO of the Yale start-up Pangolin Therapeutics (www.pangolintherapeutics.com). Susan is committed to working with great science and multidisciplinary teams to produce new medicines.
She began her career at Pfizer where she stewarded a drug discovery research lab focused on antibiotic and immune enhancer therapies. Later in Strategic Alliances, she and the group delivered over $200M of biotech and academic investments including with companies such as Evotec and ArQule, and with universities worldwide by implementing the pioneering Drug Pfinder Program.
Susan was compelled by the work of Nobel laureate Tom Steitz and Professor Peter Moore at Yale in which they determined the high resolution 3-D crystal structure of the 50S ribosome. Having worked in antibiotic drug discovery, she appreciated the challenge of discovering new classes of antibiotic agents to overcome growing problems of resistance. Forming a biotech to exploit the 3-D structure of the ribosome to industrialize structure-based drug design and produce a pipeline of novel antibiotics became her goal. She left Pfizer to found Rib-X Pharmaceuticals with Steitz and Moore build a multidisciplinary team of talented crystallographers, computational chemists and world-renowned antibiotic drug hunters. During her tenure, Susan raised over $150M in venture capital and several million in government grants. She established an R&D organization with a strong, positive culture. Her team succeeded in placing several novel classes of antibiotics into the clinic. 
Susan left Rib-X to pursue mentoring faculty and start-up biotech/tech teams as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Yale Ventures. She also worked with Yale students on varied start-up projects from a a biochar-based soil enhancement approach to an app to aid bullied students. At the same time Susan was CEO of CURE (now BioCT) working to grow Connecticut’s life sciences ecosystem. She spearheaded building one of the recent new biotech incubators in CT, BioCT Innovation Commons. 
Susan has held board directorships on several biotech companies, on the CT Angel Investor Fund and on several not-for-profit organizations. Her accomplishments have been recognized by a number of awards, including by Pfizer and by CT Governor Malloy, for her contributions to the CT bioscience community. Susan received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard and performed post-doctoral research in Cell Biology at Yale as a Jane Coffin Child’s Fellow. Pursuing rare birds in unusual ecosystems is another interest.