Werngard Czechtizky is Head of Medicinal Chemistry for Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity (RIA) at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. She has a track record of delivery of clinical candidates and lead compounds across several therapeutic areas (CV, Diabetes, Pain, CNS, Inflammation and Respiratory). Werngard has continuously implemented state of the art technologies into Medicinal Chemistry. These include e.g. efficient integration of machine learning methods into drug discovery projects, setup of New Modalities Medicinal Chemistry capabilities, implementation of automated synthesis, purification and analytics facilities and efficient integration of compound synthesis with physchem & eADME profiling to accelerate DMTA cycles. Werngard is part of AZ’s Global Chemistry Council, serves on scientific advisory boards of journals and conferences, and is co-/author of ca 80 publications and patents. She has studied at the Technical University of Graz, Austria, received a PhD from ETH Zürich and a postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Before joining AZ in 2017, she has been Head of Chemistry at Sanofi Frankfurt, Germany.