Joshua Boger, Ph.D                                                                                                                                 

Founder & former CEO

Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Joshua Boger is the founder of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (NASDAQ: VRTX) and retired as CEO in May 2009.  Prior to founding Vertex in 1989, he worked for more than a decade in pharmaceutical research at Merck, where he developed an international reputation as a leader in the application of computer modeling to the chemistry of drug design and was a pioneer in the use of structure-based rational drug design as the basis for drug discovery programs.  He holds a bachelor of arts in Chemistry and Philosophy from Wesleyan University (Connecticut) and a master's and doctorate degrees in Chemistry from Harvard University. He is the author of over 50 scientific publications, holds 31 issued U.S. patents in pharmaceutical discovery and development, and has lectured widely in the United States, in Europe and in Asia on various aspects of drug discovery, development and commercialization.

He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), Chairman of the New England Healthcare Institute (a non-profit, healthcare-policy research organization based in Cambridge. MA), Vice-Chair of the Board of Fellows of the Harvard Medical School, Co-Chairman of the Progressive Business Leaders Network (a non-profit, non-partisan business organization) and Chair of the Board of the Celebrity Series (Boston’s premier performing arts series).

He serves on several additional Boards including the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO, where he is Immediate-Past-Chairman), the Harvard Board of Overseers, The Hastings Center (the leading independent bioethics research institute, located in Garrison, NY), the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts Foundation, the Science Advisory Council of WGBH (public broadcasting’s leading station, Boston), the Museum of Science (Boston), the Longy School of Music (Cambridge, MA) Board of Visitors, the Massachusetts Workforce Investment Board, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, the Dean’s Advisory Group of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Harvard College Overseers’ Committee to Visit the Business School and the MIT Corporation Visiting Committees to the Department of Biology and to Whitaker College/Health Sciences & Technology (HST).

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