Founded in Albany in 1991, the contract research company opened a state-backed drug discovery center on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus in 2015
Baxter in a college teaching lab in early 2018, months after she left drug discovery for science education, in a still from her web series. It was not taken at AMRI. Photo: Raven the Science Maven
Raven Baxter joined Albany Molecular Research (AMRI) in May 2016 as a Research Scientist I in drug discovery. She worked at the company's drug discovery center on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus until August 2017.
The center was five months old when she arrived. AMRI opened it in December 2015 in partnership with New York State. The company's history page describes it as "a single site for biology, high-throughput screening, in vitro pharmacology and medicinal chemistry."
AMRI does contract research. "That's an organization that big pharmaceutical companies hire out on a contract to carry out smaller portions of their research," Baxter said on Ologies with Alie Ward in 2021.
Baxter described her contract research work on Ologies in 2021. Photo: Ologies with Alie Ward
Her projects changed often. "The kind of work that I was doing looked a lot different almost on a weekly basis or monthly basis," she said. She ran cell transfections and CRISPR projects and worked to build new cell lines. With neuronal cells, she looked for drugs to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.
She tested compounds on a high-content screening system. "So we were able to test hundreds and thousands of drug compounds on different cell lines to find out what drugs work the best against a certain type of cancer and then we would formulate the drug," she said.
During her tenure, the 21st Century Cures Act became law on Dec. 13, 2016. The FDA says the act was "designed to help accelerate medical product development."
In a 2024 McMaster Alumni interview, Baxter said she was "doing high throughput drug discovery." Her assay and protocol work was aimed at "cures and treatments for various cancers and diseases, specifically neurodegenerative diseases," she said.
She has drawn on the job in later public talks. At an RTI International lecture in 2021, she said, "When I was working as a drug discovery researcher, I was thinking about healing people." At Princeton in 2022, she described who held the senior posts. "It was almost all women at the bench doing research and working," she said. The senior scientists, she said, were men.
Thomas E. D'Ambra and Chester Opalka founded the company in 1991. It began in lab space provided by Siena College. It traded on Nasdaq from 1999 to 2017. In June 2017, AMRI agreed to be taken private by The Carlyle Group and GTCR for about $1.5 billion, according to Wikipedia. It renamed itself Curia in 2021.
Baxter held the job while finishing her master's degree at SUNY Buffalo State, awarded in August 2017. In 2016 she also began sharing science on social media. She left the bench in 2017 to advise students and teach biology at Buffalo State, then earned her Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo in 2022 with a dissertation on culturally responsive science communication.
She described the work at length in the Ologies episode and its official transcript.
Dr. Raven Baxter reports from the launch of the Planetary Health Check 2026 at Climate Week NYC, where she interviewed climate scientist Johan Rockström and former Unilever chief executive Paul Polman.
Dr. Raven Baxter reports from the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, from the SDG Media Zone at UN Headquarters and the Unstoppable Africa business forum.
Dr. Raven Baxter launched The Science of Life, her newsletter on Substack, on Sept. 2, 2026, with a post answering thousands of comments on a crocodile's virgin birth.
