Wilfred A. van der Donk

Wilfred A. van der Donk is the Richard E. Heckert Endowed Chair in Chemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the University of Illinois. He holds professorships in the Department of Chemistry, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. His research focuses on antibiotic discovery, chemical biology, and enzyme engineering, with emphasis on genome-mined natural products and cyclic peptides. He earned his B.S. from Leiden University (1989), Ph.D. from Rice University (1994), and conducted postdoctoral research at MIT before joining Illinois in 1997.

Research interests include designing new antibiotics, understanding enzyme functions in inflammation, and developing catalysts for environmental cleanup. His team combines synthetic chemistry, microbiology, and genomic tools to explore biosynthetic pathways of lantibiotics and phosphonate antibiotics. Recent work highlights novel cyclic peptides and phosphonate natural products.

He has received prestigious awards such as the National Academy of Sciences membership (2021), Harrison Howe Award (2020), and HHMI Investigator status (2008). Collaborations span multiple disciplines, including work with the Metcalf, Nair, and Zhao groups. His lab’s publications address MNIO enzymes, lanthipeptide cyclization, and subcellular localization of peptides in human cells.