Prof. Javed Iqbal is appointed as Director of ILS from October 1st , 2007. This appointment follows from the strategic direction of the Institute on its journey towards building a strong discovery research focus at ILS.

After graduating from Delhi University in 1977, he went to Cambridge University to work as a SERC post- doctoral fellow with Prof. Ian Fleming, FRS. He subsequently moved to Oxford University and worked with Prof. Sir J. E Baldwin, FRS on penicillin biosynthesis. After teaching for a Year at University of Montpellier, France he returned to India in 1984 and joined IIT Kanpur as a faculty in the department of chemistry and became a professor there in 1990.

He made a switch from academia to industry and joined Dr. Reddy’s Research Foundation, Hyderabad as Senior Vice-President of research in the year 2000. After spending a year as Director, Regional Research Laboratory (CSIR), Trivandrum he came back to Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Lts. (DRL) in January 2003 and was given a title of Distinguished Research Scientist and Global Head, discovery chemistry. He was heading a research group of 140 scientists at the Hyderabad and Atlanta discovery research facility of DRL.
At DRL, his discovery chemistry group was responsible for designing and synthesizing small molecules for therapeutic targets like PPAR (Diabetes), AMP Kinase (Diabetes), MAP and Aurora kinases (Cancer), JNK (Diabetes, Inflammation), CB1 (Obesity), lipoic acid syntheses (Diabetes, Obesity), CETP (Cardiovascular) and on targets responsible for Perlecan induction. In addition to this, his group was extensively involved on the synthesis of antibacterials based on oxazolidinone and tetracycline scaffolds.

He has 30 years of teaching and research experience and has ~200 research publications in international journals. He has guided 25 Ph.D., 10 post-doctoral fellows and 30 M.Sc. students at IIT Kanpur and DRL.
He was a visiting professor at University of Notre Dame, USA ( 1989-90) and University of Okayama, Japan (1994). He has also taught at New Mexico State University, USA during 1997-2000 in the summer semesters.
He is a fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and Indian National Sciences Academy, New Delhi. His research interest includes synthetic organic chemistry, medical chemistry and discovery of new drugs in the area of diabetes, cancer, bacterial infection and cardiovascular diseases. He has pioneered the research work on AMPK as therapeutic target for treating diabetes and obesity and is the co–inventor of an AMPK activator which is currently undergoing Phase I/II clinical trial.