Paige N. Vinson, Ph.D.

Director, High-Throughput Screening

Paige Vinson, Ph.D., leads a team of scientists in Southern Research High-Throughput Screening Center, where advanced robotic equipment sifts through hundreds of thousands of compounds looking for potential treatments for viruses, bacterial infections and diseases like diabetes, cancer, and cystic fibrosis. This capability, paired with cell-based and biochemical assays selected to reflect the biology being studied, provides a foundation that supports hit identification as well as downstream drug discovery efforts. She gained experience in providing high-throughput drug discovery solutions to researchers in both academia and industry as part of the laboratory automation business unit at Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Following this role, Vinson returned to a research environment at Vanderbilt University where she spent twelve years participating in team science, including drug discovery efforts, both as director of HTS and in the molecular pharmacology group of the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery. During this time, she helped bridge academic investigators’ basic research to early translational stages and helped drive later-stage projects by providing in vitro pharmacology support.

Serving on multidisciplinary project teams, including several partnerships with biopharmaceutical companies, has given Paige a broad perspective of the early drug discovery landscape. Vinson holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of South Alabama and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Emory University where she applied analytical approaches to answer questions in neuroscience. She completed postdoctoral training at Emory University performing biochemical and enzymological studies of monoamine oxidase A and B. Her drug discovery experience spans different target classes and diseases but has primarily focused on GPCR targets in CNS disorders. She brings her love of data-driven approaches and team science to Southern Research.