Jinghai (Jim) Xu currently serves as Executive Director of Corporate Development/Strategic Planning at Merck & Co (known as MSD outside of US and Canada). He leads a team of biopharmaceutical professionals who are responsible for competitive analyses, insights, and recommendations across multiple therapeutic areas to enable critical decision making in commercial strategies, R&D investments, corporate development, and business development & licensing. Previously Jim has led research activities in knowledge discovery, knowledge management, systems biology, predictive toxicology, and automated biotechnology at Merck, Pfizer, and CuraGen. Jim received his Ph.D. in Toxicology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at Cambridge, USA. He has been honored with a number of awards including Whitaker Health Sciences Fellowship, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Young Investigator Award, Pfizer Central Research Achievement Award, and Merck Special Achievement Award. Jim also serves as an industrial-academic advisory committee member and an author/editor/reviewer for Wiley & Sons and Cambridge University Press.