Dr. Skerlj has been Expansion's President and Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Expansion Board of Directors since October 2020.  He was most recently Chief Scientific Officer of X4 Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where he also was one of the company’s scientific founders and co-inventor of its lead drug candidate, mavorixafor. Prior to joining X4, Dr. Skerlj held leadership roles in drug discovery and development at Lysosomal Therapeutics where he co-invented LTI-291, a CNS drug in clinical development for Parkinson’s disease. Previous to that, he was interim Head of Small Molecule Discovery at Genzyme and part of the executive team at AnorMED, a publicly traded company that was acquired by Genzyme in 2006. Dr. Skerlj is an accomplished drug hunter and  inventor of 56 patents, including those covering invanz (FDA approval: 2001),  plerixafor (FDA  approval: 2008), venglustat, mavorixafor and LTI-291 and is the author of over 70 publications. Dr. Skerlj received his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of British Columbia and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford and Ohio State University. He obtained a B.Sc. (Hons.) in chemistry from the University of Otago.