Dr. Gerardo Turcatti directs the Biomolecular Screening Facility (BSF) he created at the EPFL in 2006. In the frame of the National program NCCR-Chemical Biology, he leads the project ‘ACCESS’ ‘An Academic Chemical Screening Platform for Switzerland’ since 2011. Previously he co-founded and acted as CTO of Manteia S.A., a Swiss-based company that developed revolutionary high throughput DNA sequencing technologies currently commercialized by Illumina Inc. Prior to this experience, Dr Turcatti had a long multidisciplinary career in R&D divisions of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies with extensive expertise in several Chemical Biology-related disciplines such as Drug Screening, Bio-analytical Chemistry, Receptor Biochemistry, DNA and Protein Chemistry. Dr Turcatti earned his Master in Chemical Engineering at the University of Geneva and his PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the EPFL where he received the award for the best doctoral thesis of the year.