Every year the MIT Technology Reviews magazine publishes a list of researchers under 35 from all disciplines, universities, corporations, or startups that they consider the top technology innovators. Professor Paul Hergenrother joins this select group of researchers cited for their innovative and potentially world altering research.
Their description of his work is below:
Paul Hergenrother is a chemist who takes on huge, unsolved medical problems: antibiotic resistance, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease. His small-molecule compounds bind tightly to unconventional disease-related targets, deactivating them. For example, Hergenrother found compounds that eliminate plasmids, the DNA rings that deadly bacteria use to spread antibiotic resistance. That pioneering project led him to a general method for finding drugs that target a particular type of RNA--messenger RNA--as a way to silence disease-causing genes, something standard drugs can't do. Hergenrother's "ten-year vision" could lead to treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Dr. Hergenrother joined the chemistry faculty at the University of Illinois in 2001 and has gained an impressive list of awards since his arrival. He has been awarded a NSF-CAREER Award, Research Corporation Research Innovation Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, SCS Excellence in Teaching Award and is a Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a Center for Advanced Study Fellow.
Professor Hergenrother received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame in 1994. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin and obtained his Ph.D. in 1999; during this time Paul was the recipient of an American Chemical Society graduate student fellowship and the Roche Award for Excellence in Organic Chemistry. He then received a American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University.