Welcome to the Department of Medicinal Chemistry
Our Department consists of a diverse group of faculty members, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and research scientists working at the interface of chemistry and biology and is home to the editorial offices of the ACS Infectious Diseases. It was previously home to the editorial offices of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
The department is part of the College of Pharmacy and University health sciences, which house nationally and internationally acclaimed programs in the areas of biochemistry, neuroscience, pharmacology, virology, immunology, cancer biology, structural biology, and drug delivery.
The Graduate Program has been awarding PhD degrees to students for over seventy-five years. The program has a long and distinguished history of being among the top medicinal chemistry programs in the country. Read Department Head Carston Wagner's Bio.
About Medicinal Chemistry
Medicinal Chemistry is a dynamic, multifaceted scientific discipline that is dedicated to the improvement of human health through research leading to new concepts for the design and development of safe and effective therapeutic, diagnostic, and environmental agents. Research in Medicinal Chemistry involves the application of both chemical and biological principles to investigations between molecular structure and biological activity.
Examples include the design and synthesis of new medicinal agents, the development of new concepts for the design of selectively acting ligands, improvement of existing drugs by molecular modification, structure elucidation of biologically active natural products, physicochemical and theoretical studies on drugs and macromolecules, investigations of the effects of molecular structure on the distribution, pharmacokinetics, metabolism and toxicity of biologically active substances, and the application of the basic principles of chemistry and molecular biology to the development and production of medicinals from natural sources.