Kelley Larson is the Acting Head of Neuropharmacology at Ilios Therapeutics. She is also the Senior Director of Discovery Biology at Vigil Neuroscience, where she was the founding member of the Vigil neuroinflammation laboratories and successfully built a multifunctional, translational neurobiology team.

Previously, she was a Principal Scientist at Tiaki Therapeutics, where she was the founding laboratory scientist and worked to build an ex vivo platform to identify novel microglial targets for neurodegeneration. Prior to Tiaki, she worked at multiple companies to develop cell-based assays to model various neurodegenerative diseases and identify therapeutics, including Cyclerion, Yumanity Therapeutics, Ra Pharma, Galenea, and Paratek Pharmaceuticals.

Kelley earned her master’s degree from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts. She has multiple patents, publications, and posters, and has been instrumental in multiple successful IND submissions, as well as the generation of non-clinical pharmacology data to enable Orphan Drug Designation for a rare disease.

With over 20 years of drug discovery experience, and a passion for identifying therapeutics for neuroinflammation and neurodegenerative diseases, her experience has led her to a reputation as an expert in the area of in vitro/ex vivo assay development for novel therapeutics.