Paul J. Hergenrother has received a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for 2006. The award is designed to support the teaching and research careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Criteria for selection included an independent body of scholarship and a commitment to education that signaled the promise of continuing outstanding contributions to both research and teaching.
Professor Hergenrother has conceived, identified, and validated a totally new anti-bacterial target, a completely novel anti-cancer target, and a potential new target for the treatment of Parkinson's disease; this in addition to the creation of several small molecules with tantalizing biological activities that have yet to be directly linked to a target.
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 an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a Center for Advanced Study Fellow, he was named a top innovator under 35 for 2005 by Technology Reviews and most recently was awarded the 2006 ACS David Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry.
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 an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University.