Robert N. Willette, PhD is currently an independent consultant serving the biotech and investment community as President of PoC Pharma Consulting, LLC. He was previously VP, unit head and senior fellow in the Heart Failure & Renal Discovery Performance Unit at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Pharmaceuticals responsible for pre-clinical discovery and clinical proof of concept. He serves on the Board of Directors of Artium Pharmaceutics.

For over 40 years he has pursued a career in the pharmaceutical industry as a discovery pharmacologist and has authored >150 original peer reviewed research papers. He has worked on and led many discovery projects in the cardiopulmonary, cerebrovascular and renal space and received the AHA Robert Seikert Award for outstanding stroke research and the George Koelle Award for contributions in Pharmacology. He has served as President of the Mid-Atlantic Pharmacology Society, a Thomas Jefferson University adjunct professor, scientific advisor to numerous biotech companies and as an industry mentor at the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania in the Institute of Translational Medicine. He has led partnerships with Boston biotech firms and the Trident consortium at UPENN to explore new modalities for the treatment of kidney disease.

Bob earned his doctoral degree from the Department of Pharmacology at Rutgers University. His postdoctoral training was in cardiopulmonary biology at the Veterans Administration in NJ and the Department of Neurosurgery at Rutgers University and in Neurobiology at the Weill Medical College, Cornell University.