Associate Professor of Chemistry Wilfred van der Donk appears on the list of UIUC University Scholars named this year. Now in its 19th year, the University Scholars program recognizes excellence and provides $10,000 to each scholar to use to enhance his or her academic career.
Professor van der Donk's research accomplishments have established him as one of the leading bioorganic chemists of his generation. He has answered a long-standing and important question relating to the action of a key enzyme (COX-2) involved in the body's physiological response to injury and infection. He has elucidated the mechanism by which certain enzymes in anaerobic organisms are able to break carbon-chlorine bonds and thus render chlorocarbon molecules less toxic. In addition, he has uncovered the chemical pathway responsible for the enzymatic conversion of phosphite to phosphate, a reaction that has commercial potential in the manufacture of fine chemicals. Finally, he has developed a general method for the biosynthesis of entirely new kinds of lantibiotics, molecules that are powerful antibacterial medicines. Professor van der Donk is distinguished by the breadth and importance of the problems he chooses to study, the depth of his scientific analysis, and the scholarship that characterizes his publications.
He has previously won the Burroughs-Wellcome New Investigator Award in the Pharmacological Sciences, the Research Innovation Award of the Research Corporation, the 3M Award for Non-tenured Faculty, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Cottrell Scholar Award of the Research Corporation, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Pfizer Award of the Biological Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. Locally, he has won the Helen Corley Petit Award of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which is given for extraordinary accomplishment during the tenure probation period, and a School of Chemical Sciences Teaching Award.
Inside Illinois, 2/17/2005.