Dr. Ismail Kola joined Forepont in April 2019 and is a senior advisor.

Prior to Forepont, Ismail held several senior executive positions in the pharmaceutical industry. He has published 159 papers in top scientific journals which have been cited over 16,000 times and has led teams that have brought numerous major medicines to the market during his 20-year career. Until 2018, Dr. Kola was the CSO of UCB, and prior he was the, SVP, Discovery Research and Early Clinical Research & Experimental Medicine at Schering-Plough Research Institute; Chief Scientific Officer, Schering Plough Corporation; SVP Basic Research and Site Head, Rahway, Montreal and Madrid at Merck; Chairman of Merck’s Antibacterial and Antifungal Worldwide Business Strategy Team; and VP Research, and Global Head, Genomics and Biotechnology at Pharmacia Corporation. Prior to his move to this industry, Ismail was Professor of Human Molecular Genetics, Monash University Medical School and Director of the Research Center for Functional Genomics and Human Disease for 15 years. He is a Visiting Professor of Medicine at the Nuffield School of Medicine at Oxford University and holds Adjunct Professorships of Medicine at Washington University, St Louis, MO, and Monash University Medical School, Melbourne, Australia; Foreign Adjunct Professorship at The Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden; and is a William Pitt Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, UK.   Dr. Kola holds a Ph.D. (Med) in Medicine from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.