Melissa Crisp | Senior Director
Eli Lilly & Company

Melissa Crisp, Ph.D. is a Senior Director of Automation & Screening Technologies at Eli Lilly and Company in San Diego, where she leads a team advancing biologics drug discovery through innovative automation strategies and screening platforms. With over 20 years of experience spanning academia, pharma, and biotech, Melissa has built state-of-the-art automation platforms, including high-throughput systems for protein expression, cell culture, and functional cell-based screening. Her team’s work has accelerated therapeutic discovery across multiple large molecule programs and continues to evolve through continuous improvement, Lab of the Future initiatives, and an expanding repertoire of automated solutions. Melissa earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Cell Biology from the University of Florida College of Medicine and completed postdoctoral training at Scripps Florida, where she specialized in ultra-high-throughput small molecule screening as part of the NIH MLPCN initiative. A passionate advocate for scientific innovation and collaboration, she currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) and was the 2024 SLAS Conference Chair.