Jeffrey Johnston, Co-Director

Jeffrey Johnston obtained his B.S. (Honors) in Chemistry (summa cum laude) in 1992 from Xavier University. While at Xavier, he completed his undergraduate thesis research with Professor Robert G. Johnson. He continued his training in organic chemistry at the Ohio State University working with Leo A. Paquette. There, he developed the oxonium ion-mediated pinacol rearrangement and was involved with two efforts in natural products total synthesis (polycavernoside A, taxol).

In 1997, he moved to Harvard to join Professor David A. Evans as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. In the Evans group, he developed (with M. Willis, U. Bath) the first highly diastereoselective and enantioselective Mukaiyama-Michael reactions using bisoxazoline copper(II) Lewis acids as catalysts while delineating the associated mechanistic details. He began his independent career at Indiana University in 1999 and was ultimately promoted to Professor of Chemistry with tenure.

In 2006, he moved with his research group to Vanderbilt University where he is currently a Professor of Chemistry and a member of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology. His research program has been recognized by several organizations, including the Boehringer-Ingelheim New Investigator Award, the Yamanouchi and Astellas faculty awards, an Amgen Young Investigator Award, and an Eli Lilly Grantee Award. At Indiana University, he received the IU Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, as well as an IU Trustees Teaching Award.

Gary Sulikowski, Co-Director

Gary Sulikowski received a BS in chemistry from Wayne State University and a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. He was an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. His first faculty appointment was in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University in 1991, where he was promoted to full professor in 2001. He joined the Vanderbilt Chemistry Department as Professor of Chemistry and member of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology in the 2004-2005 academic year.

Dr. Sulikowski's research area is organic and bioorganic chemistry. His research interests are in the development of synthetic strategies and reactions, biomimetic syntheses and investigations into the biological properties of natural products. He has published over fifty research articles in the areas of natural products chemistry and biology.

Craig Lindsley, Consultant

Craig Lindsley received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1996 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Lipshutz laboratory developing novel bi-directional organometallic linchpins for all-E polyene synthesis. Then as an ICCB (Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology) postdoctoral fellow in the labs of Prof. Matt Shair at Harvard University, he developed a solid phase biomimetic synthesis of carpanone-like molecules.

After brief stints at Parke-Davis and Eli Lilly, Dr. Lindsley joined the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Merck and Company in West Point, PA. Merck where he established and led the Technology Enabled Synthesis (TES) group as a senior research fellow/group leader.

By application of an iterative parallel synthesis approach in combination with microwave synthesis technology and a custom, mass-directed preparative LCMS platform, Dr. Lindsley's TES group rapidly developed proof of concept compounds for nascent programs as well as four preclinical candidates with only 1-2 chemists/project. During his six years at Merck, Dr. Lindsley delivered six preclinical development candidates for cancer and neuroscience programs.

In 2006, Dr. Lindsley joined the faculty of the Vanderbilt University as Director of Medicinal Chemistry to direct the medicinal chemistry efforts of the Vanderbilt Program in Drug Discovery, with a primary mission of facilitating translation of recent advances in basic science to novel therapeutics. Dr. Lindsley is Associate Editor of Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry and serves on the editorial boards of two other international journals. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the NIH National Chemical Genomics Center, and is a worldwide medicinal chemistry consultant for Amgen. Dr. Lindsley’s current research is focused on development of novel treatment strategies for schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, and other brain disorders.

Kwangho Kim, Research Assistant Professor

Kim was born and raised in South Korea and received his B. A. and M.S. degrees in chemistry and polymer chemistry from Hanyang University. Prior to attending Ph.D. program, he worked in Daelim Industrial, a petrochemical company in Korea, as a senior research scientist for 7 years. In 1998, Kim moved to Japan and began graduate studies in chemical synthesis at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Under the direction of Professor Fumie Sato, he was involved in the development of novel synthetic methodologies and synthesis of biologically active compounds. In particular Kim developed novel chiral building blocks to construct a number of multifunctional chiral acyclic and cyclic compounds by using organotitanium reagents, and obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2001. For his research and education, I received the Japanese Government Monbusho Scholarship and Sasagawa Scientific Research Grant from the Japan Science Society.

From 2001-2004, Kim was a postdoctoral research associate in the laboratory of Professor Gary A. Sulikowski at Texas A&M University in college station, where he contributed to the total synthesis of hibarimicin B and congeners of a protein tyrosine kinase inhibitor. In 2004, Prof. Sulikowski moved his research group to Vanderbilt University where Kim was involved in the total synthesis of hibarimicin B, upenamide, and epothilone. In 2006, he joined the chemical synthesis core as a senior research specialist.