Sandra Jacob is a structural biologist with significant experience in drug discovery. She received her B.Sc. majoring in chemistry from the University of Melbourne in Australia and followed this up with a Ph.D. using protein crystallography at the St. Vincent’s Institute of Medical research in Melbourne. In postdoctoral work at Uppsala University in Sweden, Sandra was involved in the development of molecular graphics tools, while continuing her structural studies of medically relevant proteins. This was followed by work at the University of Basel where she solved structures of integral membrane proteins resulting in publications in Nature and Science. In 1993 she joined Ciba Geigy, now Novartis, working on drug discovery projects in many different indications. She is internally and externally recognized for her expertise in kinase inhibition and her work has resulted in the discovery of Tasigna, a drug for the treatment of Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia. For this she received the American Chemical Society heroes of chemistry prize in 2012. She is a driver of novel approaches for target modulation, the most recent examples being non-ATP site inhibitors of kinases. Over her time in Novartis she has taken on positions of increasing responsibility and is now head of the Structural Biophysics core science group of CPC in Basel.