Paul J. Hergenrother is the Kenneth L. Rinehart Endowed Chair in Natural Products Chemistry at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He established his own laboratory in 2001 which seeks to understand compound accumulation in Gram-negative bacteria to then use this information to create novel antibiotics.
Paul is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Vanquish Oncology, and an anticancer compound discovered by his lab is now being used in multiple clinical trials. Paul has received numerous awards including the GlaxoSmithKline Chemistry Scholar Award and the ACS David Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry. He has also been named an American Cancer Society Research Scholar and one of the top innovators under the age of 35 by Technology Review magazine.
At the University of Illinois, Paul is the Leader of the IGB Theme ‘Anticancer Discovery from Pets to People’ and is the Director of the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Grant. Paul has served and continues to serve on the editorial and advisory board for multiple journals including ACS Central Science, Current Opinion in Chemical Biology and Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
Paul obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Texas, Austin in 1999, and moved on as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow to Harvard University, where he worked in the laboratory of Professor Stuart L. Schreiber in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.