Manuel Peitsch is Chief Scientific Officer at PMI, where he leads the scientific assessment of novel tobacco and nicotine products that have the potential to reduce the risk of harm and smoking-related disease. Manuel joined Philip Morris International R&D eleven years ago, following 15 years in the pharmaceutical industry (GlaxoWellcome and Novartis) and seven years in academia. Manuel has published over 280 articles and book chapters (>31000 citations, h-index=61, Google Scholar) and holds several patents in biotechnology and computational biology. Manuel has done pioneering work in the area of bioinformatics and molecular modeling, computational text analytics, cell biology and systems biology/toxicology. Manuel is a co-founder of several initiatives, including two start-up companies and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). He is a scientific advisor to several academic and commercial entities. Manuel holds a BSc in Life Sciences, an MSc in Physical Chemistry and a PhD in Biochemistry; he is also an Adjunct Professor for Bioinformatics at the University of Basel.

Manuel stands for scientific excellence and fosters open science, transparent data sharing and scientific verification. Manuel is passionate about Tobacco Harm Reduction to reduce the burden of disease caused by smoking.