Juan Velásquez vividly remembers that Saturday in June 2006 when he first wandered onto the quad on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus as a new graduate student in chemistry.
Less than 24 hours after landing in the wide-open Champaign County landscape dominated by corn and soybean fields, he was feeling a bit anxious about choosing the U. of I. without visiting. Those feelings turned to pure excitement as he entered the quad walking east and saw Noyes Laboratory.
“My life has changed. I am going to love this. Look at all of this gorgeous campus,” Velásquez said he remembers thinking.
Now, nearly 20 years later, Velásquez is living his dream serving as the director of Chemical Biotechonologies at Merck & Co. in New Jersey, where he has led efforts in enzyme discovery and engineering for the synthesis of pharmaceuticals targeting cancer, HIV, and cardiovascular diseases. Before that he was part of an award-winning Sustainable Materials Group team at P&G.
Velásquez graduated from Illinois with his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2011 and on April 4, 2025, he was awarded the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Young Alumni Achievement Award. He is one of seven LAS Alumni Awards recipients.
Chemistry professor Wilfred van der Donk was his advisor at Illinois and nominated him for the alumni award, emphasizing the impressive achievements of Velásquez so early in his career.
At P&G, he received two awards in 2019, the CEO Award for the development of biomaterials and their application in consumer products and the John G. Smale Award, which is the most prestigious award given by P&G for Research and Development and was awarded to Velásquez for outstanding contributions to the development of heme-dependent oxygenases and their application in consumer products. In 2020, he received a national American Chemical Society Award for Affordable Green Chemistry. In just three years at Merck, he has quickly ascended to Director of Chemical Biotechnologies. He has more than 60 patents and peer-reviewed publications, and in addition to his career achievements, he has been highly involved in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts as well.
“Juan was always destined to do great things,” van der Donk said.
Prof. van der Donk said Velasquez was one of the most creative students he has ever had, always coming up with new ideas and inventive solutions.
"I was most impressed by his ability to bring to bear to a problem very different approaches and technologies, including those that were foreign to our lab. Juan would read the literature so broadly that he would suggest approaches I would never have considered, and in more than one case, those approaches ended up being a superior way to solve our questions,” van der Donk said.
As a young man growing up in Medellin, Colombia, Velásquez said he always had a dream of impacting the health of people through science and considered pursuing his dream by studying genetics or genetic engineering. But with few career opportunities in genetics in Colombia, he studied chemical engineering instead and excelled. Recognizing his talent and potential, his professors at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, where he graduated with high honors and a B.S. in chemical engineering, encouraged him to be fearless in applying to top graduate schools.
The Illinois chemistry Ph.D. program was on his list, and he was admitted. In his first year, he said the graduate program opened his eyes to the amazing breadth of research undertaken by the faculty, and he remembers emailing his brother and his aunt while studying on a Friday night in the library.
“I think that I have found my purpose in life,” he wrote to them. “I want to impact people’s lives. I have seen what people have done here or are doing. I know that it is difficult, but I really want to do this.”
Velásquez considered a research career in academia, but an intriguing opportunity with P&G came up one year before he graduated. He accepted the opportunity to join the Sustainable Materials Group to work on developing biotechnological processes for incorporating bio-based materials into the production of P&G products.
Velásquez began working with a P&G team trying to find more sustainable solutions for diapers, specifically figuring out how to make diapers with sustainable resources to decrease their environmental impact.
Ultimately, Velásquez and the team developed a catalytic process for converting sugar-derived lactic acid into superabsorbent polymeric materials for diapers that will decrease the environmental impact when they are disposed.
The innovation received the American Chemical Society National Award for Affordable Green Chemistry in 2020.
“It was one of the most gratifying projects in my life,” Velásquez said. “Both because of the technical challenge and because the impact of the project was so meaningful and so important.”
P&G doesn’t make the polymers used in their products, so their patented process was transferred to a supplier that is currently in the process of commercializing the technology.
Very soon, Velásquez said, he hopes to see more environmentally friendly diapers on the market that have been produced with their technology.
“That material is also used in detergents and paints, so it has the potential to impact a lot of different industries because it's one of the big commodities in the chemical industry,” he explained. “And there is the potential for a significant reduction of impact to the environment compared to the traditional petro-derived process that is used today by the chemical industry across the world. And that’s a process that has been in use for more than 6 decades now.”
Velásquez said it was a very interesting, challenging and rewarding project with an amazing group of people with whom he remains close, and he very much enjoyed his time at P&G, but during the pandemic a new opportunity arose at Merck.
“Obviously, all of us had a lot of time to think. And one of the dreams that I always had since I moved from Colombia was impacting the health of people, perhaps working in a pharmaceutical company. P&G impacted people in many ways that are very relevant, but I always felt that I wanted to explore working in a pharmaceutical company and being able to impact medicines,” he said.
He is doing exactly that and has quickly advanced to his current role as a Director of Chemical Biotechonologies at Merck.
Initially at Merck, he worked on a biocatalytic process for a kidney cancer drug that is now commercialized. Then he went to work on a molecule that is expected to significantly impact cardiovascular health.
But the challenge his team faced was figuring out how to produce this new complex molecule in an affordable and sustainable way.
“We needed to change the chemistry,” said Velásquez, who credited an amazing team of scientists with pushing the boundaries of biocatalysis to make it happen. “This was a very exciting, very challenging project, and one of the biggest accomplishments in my career as well,” he said.
Professor van der Donk said that even when Velásquez was a graduate student in his lab, he had a very strong attraction toward working for the betterment of society and wanted to eventually work where he could make the biggest impact.
“And he certainly has,” van der Donk said.
After an adjustment, Velásquez now enjoys the fast pace of New Jersey where Merck is based, but Velásquez said he always enjoys returning to the Illinois campus.
“Every time that I go to Champaign-Urbana, I get the feeling that I am home. I am at the place that opened my views to the world and to imagination. And it’s still super comforting. And I don’t think that feeling is going to ever change, which is amazing,” he said.
He said working in the van der Donk lab within the interdisciplinary environment of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Chemical-Biology Interface program were the two major highlights of his time at Illinois.
“Definitely fantastic memories in the lab,” he said, adding that working with faculty and other graduate students from multiple labs and different backgrounds and experiences and meeting talented, renowned scientists who came to campus for conferences, lectures, and seminars, was very impactful.
“That learning was so important and is so relevant for what I do today, developing processes for pharmaceuticals,” said Velásquez, who mentioned that he still has his notes from graduate school in binders in his office. “I still go to those for ideas and inspiration.”
At Illinois, Velásquez worked with other graduate students to start a chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, which continues today.
He said that group helped him to embrace his identity as both a Hispanic person and a scientist.
“Getting involved in SACNAS was about realizing that we are scientists, but we are also Hispanics and that’s totally okay and something that we should embrace instead of trying to hide,” he said.