William L. Jorgensen, newly appointed as a Sterling Professor of Chemistry, has been at the forefront of computational chemistry and molecular design.
A Sterling Professorship is one of the University’s highest faculty honors.
His research in organic, medicinal and computational chemistry includes simulations of organic and enzymatic reactions, computer-aided drug design, and the synthesis and development of therapeutic agents targeting infectious and hyperproliferative diseases
A member of the American Academy of Sciences since 2007, Jorgensen has won numerous honors for his work, including the Sato Memorial International Award from the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan; the Award in Computational Biology from the International Society for Quantum Biology and Pharmacology; the American Chemical Society’s Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research and its Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award; and two Special Creativity Awards from the National Science Foundation, among others. A major symposium in his honor was held at Yale in 2005.
Jorgensen earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Princeton University and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University. He taught from 1975 to 1990 at Purdue University, where he was the head of the organic chemistry division and the Herbert C. Brown Professor of Chemistry. He joined the Yale faculty in 1990 as the Whitehead Professor of Chemistry. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University.
Jorgensen has presented more than 600 lectures throughout the United States and around the world and has held many named lectureships.
The Yale scientist is the editor of the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation and the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. He formerly was editor of the Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry and the Journal of Computational Chemistry.
He has served on several American Chemical Society committees and has been an adviser or consultant to many chemical or pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer Global Research, Parke-Davis, Schrödinger, CombiChem, Agouron and Ariad. He is the founder of Rib-X Pharmaceutical Inc. and serves on its scientific advisory board.
Jorgensen is a member or fellow of the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Quantum Biology and Pharmacology, the International AIDS Society, the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.
