Paul Hergenrother

Professor Paul Hergenrother is a Kenneth Rinehart Jr. Endowed Chair at the University of Illinois, with additional appointments as Chemistry Professor, Deputy Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois, and member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. His research spans synthetic organic chemistry, chemical biology, and biochemistry, focusing on discovering organic molecules for cancer and antibiotic resistance targets.

• B.S., University of Notre Dame (1994)
• Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin (1999)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University

Research Interests:

• Designing complex organic molecules to target cancer via procaspase-3 activation (PAC-1) and NQO1-specific agents (DNQ)
• Developing antibiotics against drug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria using predictive accumulation guidelines
• Innovative Complexity-to-Diversity (CtD) synthesis from natural products

Scientific Awards:

• AAAS Fellow (2019)
• ACS Sosnovsky Award (2018)
• Arthur C. Cope Scholar (2017)
• Multiple ACS/industry awards and fellowships

Collaborations: Partnerships with Carle Illinois physicians for clinical trials and patient testing, including PAC-1 human trials. His lab has generated 170+ peer-reviewed articles and 56 patents.