Dr. Knapp is the chief scientific officer of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interests are the rational design of selective inhibitors that target protein kinases as well as protein interactions modules that function as reader domains of the epigenetic code. He joined Frankfurt University (Germany) in 2015 as a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Buchmann Institute of Molecular Life Sciences.
From 2012 and 2015 he was the director for Chemical Biology at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI), and between 2008 to 2015 he was a professor of structural biology at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine (NDM) at Oxford University (UK). Previously, he was a principal research scientist in structural biology and biophysics at Pharmacia Corporation.
Dr. Knapp studied chemistry at the University of Marburg (Germany) and at the University of Illinois (USA). He did his Ph.D. in protein crystallography at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden) and continued his career at the Karolinska Institute as a postdoctoral scientist.