Reid Leonard Director, External Research and Licensing Merck Research Laboratories, US

Dr. Reid Leonard is Senior Director, External Research and Licensing for the Merck Research Laboratories. His home base is Merck’s newly-opened Boston research center at 33 Ave Louis Pasteur, in the Longwood Medical Area.

Reid’s role is to identify partnering opportunities that fit with Merck’s strategic research and development goals across all therapeutic and technology areas. This is an outreach function to complement Merck’s existing world-wide licensing and collaborative research activities. As such, the focus is on early-stage opportunities: university technologies, incubator and start-up companies, and programs within established companies that may be a “good fit” for Merck, but which are not (yet) actively seeking a partner. His goal to build relationships that will foster lasting, productive partnerships between Merck and other members of the biomedical research community. Reid’s geographic area of responsibility, shared with Dr. Robert Gould, Vice President, Worldwide Licensing and External Research, is the Eastern United States.

Dr. Leonard graduated from Brandeis in 1980 with a BA in biology and psychology. He earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Purdue in 1985. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular pharmacology at Caltech, Reid joined the Merck Research Labs in Rahway, NJ. After ten years of discovery research in ion channel biology, Reid moved into External Scientific Affairs, where he was responsible for the scientific evaluation of partnering opportunities in several therapeutic areas, most recently endocrine/metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. In November 2005, Reid transitioned to the newly-created “licensing ambassador/scout” role in Boston.

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