Management

Ash Jayagopal, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer

Ash Jayagopal, PhD

Dr. Jayagopal has more than 13 years of experience in drug development, drug delivery technology and biomarker development for retinal diseases. Prior to joining Opus as Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Jayagopal served as the Executive Director of Discovery Medicine at Kodiak Sciences, where he led the drug discovery team and shaped the strategy for leveraging Kodiak’s biopolymer technology for delivery of large and small molecules in retinal diseases. Previously, Dr. Jayagopal was Head of Molecular Pharmacology and Biomarkers in the ophthalmic drug discovery division at Roche, where he built and led a team of more than 25 scientists focused on the discovery and validation of biologics, small molecules, and gene therapies for retinal diseases, including inherited retinal diseases. Dr. Jayagopal previously served as a National Institutes of Health-funded Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute, and the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics of Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Jayagopal holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and an M.B.A. from Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. He has been awarded a Roche Key Contributor Award, Dolly Green Special Scholar Award from Research to Prevent Blindness, and a Junior Faculty Award from the American Diabetes Association. He is a Fellow of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (FARVO) and is the Vice President and President-elect of the Association for Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (AOPT).