Declan Jones

VP & Head of External Innovation, Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Vice President Global Head of External Innovation & Scientific Licensing, Ferring Pharmaceuticals Ltd.
Declan Jones joined Ferring Pharmaceuticals in April 2020 to lead the Global External Innovation & Scientific Licensing team with team members in Geneva, The Netherlands, Copenhagen, Israel, Singapore, and San Diego. Declan is a pharmacologist with over 27 years experience in both internal and external drug discovery and development across therapeutic areas and treatment modalities. He has a particular interest in the overlap between academia and industry.

Before joining Ferring, he spent the last 12 years working in External Innovation for GlaxoSmithKline (Head of Research, Centre of Excellence for External Drug Discovery) and most recently as Vice President Neuroscience External Innovation for Janssen Pharmaceuticals at the J&J Innovation Centre in London.

Declan has served as a panel member on the UK’s BBSRC grant (Neuroscience) committee, Innovate UK’s Innovation Scholars scheme, and was a founding Executive Team member for several Public Private Partnerships (including Neuroimmunology in Mood & Alzheimer’s or NIMA; Dementias Platform UK (DPUK), Psychiatry Consortium), a member of the SABs for the Medicines Discovery Catapult, Parkinson’s UK, and for the South London and Maudsley Mental Health BRC at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, and a member of the British Association for Psychopharmacology Council. Declan also worked closely with J&J co-funded innovators such as Dementia Discovery Fund, Dementia Consortium, JLABS, and Apollo Therapeutics – which incubate novel science emerging from academia.

Declan holds a PhD from the University of Bradford and did post-doctoral work at Emory University (Atlanta, USA) and Glaxo Group Research. He has over 80 publications and book chapters.