A member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Phytochemistry Society of Europe (PSE), the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), and an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), Dr. Andrew Mtewa is a Medicinal Chemist trained for his PhD under the Wellcome Center for Anti-infectives Research (WCAiR) at the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee in Scotland and the Pharm-Biotechnology and Traditional Medicine Centre at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda. He attended a Phytochemistry PhD summer School at Kenya’s Egerton University on a DAAD scholarship and did some research with the African Center for Public Health and Herbal Medicine in Malawi. His main area of interest is Drug Design and Development using medicinal chemistry aspects and various computational and synthetic techniques to obtain logical hits to leads for particular biological targets from synthetic scaffolds in various libraries, de novo as well as from natural products towards the making of drugs against various diseases. He did his MSc degree in Applied Chemistry (Natural Product Chemistry). 

Before joining the academia, Andrew has held several roles including but not limited to being Quality Assurance Manager for Valid Nutrition’s therapeutic foods’ factory, assistant Quality Control Manager (Shifts controller) for Alliance One International Tobacco Processors and Graduate Trainee for the Japanese Tobacco International (JTI), Malawi factory, then Africa Leaf Tobacco. He founded Leptons Scientific consultants in 2011 and has provided consultancy services in his areas of expertise to various clients. For close to a decade now, Andrew has also been researching military strategies, security and weaponry among others. 

He studied Intelligence Analysis, counter-terrorism and is trained in H2H close combat. He has contributed to over 100 publications in form of journal articles and book chapters with various publishers such as Elsevier and is a reviewer for various journals including Systematic Reviews, Tuberculosis and the African Health Sciences among others. Andrew is the lead editor for various books including ‘Phytochemistry, the Military and Health; Phytotoxins and Natural Defenses’ and ‘Cannabis and Khat in Drug Discovery; The Discovery Pipeline and the Endocannabinoid System’ by Elsevier and ‘Poisonous Plants and Phytochemicals in Drug Discovery’ by Wiley.

 Andrew has also been a lead guest editor for a series: 'Allergies and Anti-allergy Drug Discovery in Africa' with Frontiers in Allergy. Currently, Andrew is a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at the Malawi University of Science and Technology in Malawi. He has a passion to introduce drug discovery science to young children and coach and train upcoming drug discoverers to search for drugs beyond plant extracts to compound level towards optimization. In his free time, he plays strategy video games and practices close-quarters self-defense in Krav Maga and Wing Chun.

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