Macromolecular Chemistry

BIOGRAPHY

Michael C. Pirrung, Professor and UC Presidential Chair in Chemistry, UC-Riverside

Michael Pirrung received his Ph. D degree in organic chemistry at UC-Berkeley in 1980 under the direction of Clayton Heathcock, and did postdoctoral work with Gilbert Stork at Columbia as an NSF postdoctoral fellow. He began his academic career at Stanford in 1981, and during 1989 served as a Senior Scientist at Affymax Research Institute, Palo Alto, CA. In 1990 he moved to Duke University. He has been a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley, Baylor College of Medicine, Oxford, and UC-San Diego. He has held Hertz, Sloan, and Guggenheim fellowships and a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He received the 1991 AAAS-Newcomb Cleveland Prize for a Science paper he co-authored on microarray fabrication. He was recognized with the 1993 Intellectual Property Owners Distinguished Inventor Award and the 2006 European Inventor of the Year Award for the patents arising from that work. He is a Fellow of AAAS.

His research interests include photochemistry, biosynthesis, nucleic acids, natural products, and combinatorial chemistry. Current projects in his lab involve new techniques for preparation and use of DNA chips, mechanistic studies regarding the plant growth hormone ethylene, development of novel antibacterials and antivirals, and development of modulators of protein kinases.

He advises a number of industrial research organizations as a consultant (Wyeth Pharmaceuticals) or a member of the Scientific Advisory Board. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, monographs, and reviews, and holds >20 US and foreign patents.