Biological and Medicinal Chemistry 2026 Lectureship and Award Winners

What does this award mean to you?

I am incredibly honored to receive this award. I attribute the recognition to the creativity and hard work of my mentees who have bought into my vision that the problem of antimicrobial resistance is one that requires our biggest investments and brightest ideas.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

My research aims to uncover vulnerabilities in human pathogens that we can leverage for the discovery or design of narrow spectrum anti-infectives. At a minimum, I hope our work is highlights the gap in knowledge between our understanding of model pathogens and the emerging, poorly characterized organisms that wreak havoc on healthcare systems. One recent effort has focused on the pathogens responsible for Lyme Disease and Syphilis, and it is quite surprising that despite infecting millions each year, our understanding of the metabolism that supports pathogenesis of these organisms remains limited.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

I am excited about how artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, has been used to accelerate the design and discovery of new antibiotics. I remain optimistic that similar methods will be integrated with multi-omics approaches to also expedite the discovery of new antibiotic targets, especially in non-model pathogens.

What does this award mean to you?

This award is an important recognition of my work and the efforts of my team, collaborators, and mentors. It is especially encouraging at this stage of my career and reinforces my commitment to advancing virology research. I’m honoured to be included among such an outstanding group of scientists, including former recipients whose work I greatly admire.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

My research uncovers fundamental mechanisms of viral replication and leverages these insights to develop new antiviral strategies. Our work has identified a glycan-mediated mechanism that triggers opening of human coronavirus spike proteins and revealed new principles of norovirus replication, while also contributing to antiviral development. Ultimately, I’m motivated by discoveries that impact both education and patient care.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

I’m particularly excited by the integration of new technologies that allow us to study viruses in increasingly native contexts. As a structural virologist, the shift from purified molecules to visualizing viral replication directly within cells using in situ cryo-electron tomography is especially transformative. Combined with advances in structure prediction tools like AlphaFold, these approaches are dramatically improving our ability to interpret complex structural data and uncover new biology.

What does this award mean to you?

It is an honor to receive the ACS ID Early Career Award in recognition of the work my group has done over the last few years. It is a validation that our work is valuable and important to the field of infectious disease and evolutionary virology.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

Our work uses sequencing approaches to explore the diversity of viral populations and the biological and biophysical forces that shape their evolution. In our recent work, we have pushed the boundaries of how these technologies are used, describing viral population structure in new detail, and expanding our studies of mutational selection to explore how selective pressures change across chemical and biological environments. We hope that these advances will advance our understanding of evolutionary dynamics and have real translational impacts in the field of evolutionary medicine.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

Emerging computational and experimental technologies are accelerating the field exponentially. Protein language models, molecular dynamics, and computational structural prediction are allowing us to understand the impacts of mutation more thoroughly, and new molecular biology and sequencing tools allow us to ask new questions at the bench. Together, these advances will open whole new lines of inquiry in the coming years, and I’m excited to be able to ride that wave.

What does this award mean to you?

Being selected for this award is such an honor. My group has worked hard to publish influential papers in the field of medicinal chemistry and to have that recognized by an esteemed group of my colleagues is thrilling. It solidifies that scientists around the world are reading our work and see the value in what we are doing, which motivates us to keep pushing boundaries and explore the power of medicinal chemistry further.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

One way that my group is making a difference is through the development and sharing of best-in-class chemical probes. We hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to benchmarking our molecules and embrace sharing them without restrictions to accelerate scientific discoveries. Tracking the uptake of our chemical probes via requests, publications, and citations supports that others are using them to characterize their protein targets and that our open science model is working as intended.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

The constant evolution of biology that can be explored and elicited “via small molecules excites me. Novel modalities that induce proximity between two or more proteins is an area we are exploring and hope to soon influence with our own work. We also see value in expanding the portfolio of chemical probes to include those that modulate poorly characterized proteins from across the proteome, including those previously deemed undruggable.

What does this award mean to you?

It's an honor to have our research program acknowledged by the medicinal chemistry community. I'm especially thankful to my talented team at UC San Diego whose creativity and dedication drive our research forward.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

Our work is expanding the chemical biology toolkit by developing technologies to enable systematic discovery and optimization of small molecules that act via chemically induced proximity. These platforms are helping the field understand how to rationally design molecular glues and degraders for challenging targets. In parallel, we apply induced proximity to develop prototype treatments for diseases with high unmet need.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

I am most excited by the impact of rapid advances in protein complex modeling and the uncovering of new principles of endogenous protein homeostasis, that are allowing medicinal chemists to hijack new mechanisms of cellular regulation. We're still in the early stages of being able to exploit the cells sophisticated quality control machinery for therapeutic benefit, and I am excited about the next wave of technologies that expand beyond our current repertoire of E3-ligase recruitment.

What does this award mean to you?

It is a tremendous honor to receive the ACS Chemical Biology Early Career Award, especially considering the many outstanding scientists who have received this recognition in the past and whose work has helped shape the field of chemical biology. It is humbling to be included among such an inspiring group of researchers.

At the same time, this award reflects the extraordinary students, postdoctoral associates, and staff members who have been part of my laboratory. It is a privilege to have a career where I get to work alongside such creative and driven scientists—tackling challenging problems together while constantly learning from one another. Chemical biology is an inherently collaborative field, and I have been fortunate to learn from generous mentors and colleagues throughout my career. This recognition reflects the collective effort and innovative spirit of the people I have had the opportunity to work with, and I am deeply honored to accept it on their behalf.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

The traditional paradigm for discovering chemical probes often relies on screening large, small-molecule libraries against purified proteins isolated from their native biological context. While this approach has been very successful for certain target classes, many proteins do not behave the same way outside the complex environment of the cell, and a large portion of the proteome remains poorly characterized and difficult to target. The field of chemical proteomics—pioneered by Ben Cravatt and Matt Bogyo—has begun to address this challenge by developing chemical probes to interrogate proteins directly in complex biological systems, often using covalent chemistry. These approaches have been widely adopted by the community and have already contributed to the development multiple clinical candidates.

Our laboratory is working to extend these concepts by developing technologies that enable systematic, proteome-wide discovery of noncovalent, ligandable sites directly in living cells. Rather than focusing on a single protein target or class, our goal is to map where small molecules can interact across the proteome, independent of protein function or the presence of specific reactive amino acids. By enabling comprehensive exploration of protein ligandability, we hope to reveal new biological insights and create starting points for therapeutic discovery. We are particularly excited to see elements of our platforms beginning to be translated and industrialized in drug discovery settings.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

One of the most exciting aspects of chemical proteomics is that methods for measuring protein ligandability are becoming a central hub connecting multiple areas of biology and chemistry. These approaches are powerful for discovering new druggable sites on proteins and corresponding probes, identifying targets of biologically active small molecules, and enabling new modalities. However, we are increasingly realizing that ligandability can also report on many other features of protein biology. For instances, changes in ligandability can reflect protein conformational state, post-translational modifications, mutational status, protein–protein interactions, metabolite/cofactor interactions, or subcellular localization, and these properties are often highly context dependent. We are learning that such information can be leveraged to learn new biology of that protein, or to perhaps generate context-specific chemical probes.

Looking forward, we are also excited about the integration of large-scale chemical proteomic datasets with computational and predictive approaches. Combining experimental proteome-wide measurements with emerging computational tools could allow us to better understand, and maybe even robustly predict, where small molecules can engage proteins across the proteome, accelerating both basic biological discovery and therapeutic development.

What does this award mean to you?

This award is a vital recognition for an early career researcher. It provides scientific validation for the independent research direction I have established in bioorthogonal photocatalysis. Receiving this honor during my transition to a full professorship at Beijing Normal University is particularly meaningful; it offers the visibility and momentum necessary to launch my new laboratory's next phase of innovation. This recognition from the American Chemical Society reinforces my commitment to developing rigorous chemical tools that address fundamental questions in biology and medicine.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

Our research addresses a critical gap in chemical biology by providing a programmable "remote control" for chemical reactions within complex living systems. Through the CAT-X platform, we have achieved subcellular-scale resolution in proteomics and multi-omics without relying on genetic or enzymatic methods. By leveraging near-infrared light and catalytic efficiency, we can now map membrane receptor dynamics and profile cell-cell interactions in clinical samples and living animals. This framework transforms how researchers interrogate biomolecular functions with unprecedented spatiotemporal precision and biological compatibility.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

I am most excited by the development of a universal toolkit for non-invasive, site-specific chemical intervention. The power of photochemical tools in biology lies in their dual-level controllability: the reaction space is governed by the precise localization of catalysts, while the reaction timing is governed by remote external light. While my current work focuses on light-triggered reactions, the next frontier involves harnessing a broader spectrum of exogenous stimuli, such as ultrasound and other physical signals, to achieve deep-tissue penetration for in vivo applications.

The challenge of ultrasound-controlled chemistry is significant, yet its potential for clinical application is immense. My ultimate goal is to leverage the unique advantages of chemical technology to decode complex molecular mechanisms within clinical and hard-to-transfect samples that are often inaccessible to conventional biological methods. By translating these bioorthogonal strategies into precision therapeutics, we aim to enable the site-specific activation of drugs or the modulation of biological pathways directly at the site of disease with surgical accuracy. Successfully bridging the gap between basic chemical innovation and clinical application will provide a powerful framework for both understanding and treating human diseases.

What does this award mean to you?

Other than the imposter syndrome it triggers, I'm overjoyed to be recognized by and be able to present to what I consider as my "home" community of synthetic biologists. I'm grateful that the committee resonates with the vision that my amazing group members are working tirelessly towards.

How is your research making a difference in the field?

We try to anticipate the biological constraints in the future human health application of our circuits, and preemptively circumvent or even embrace them. Examples of circumventing constraints include prioritizing designs that operate robustly in different cellular contexts and refactoring them to masquerade as human components to minimize immunogenic risks. As examples of embracing constraints, we leverage components of the secretory pathway to control intercellular communication and co-opt house-keeping RNA-editing enzymes into sensing mechanisms.

What excites you most about the future of your research area?

Speaking for myself, we live in an exciting moment where my lab members start to use ML/AI to lower the barrier on several previously impossible engineering tasks, as well as venture into and even innovate in in vivo models to put our circuits to test. As for my field, my wish list is for someone to build better computational oracles for molecular traits that we care deeply about, and to create accessible and sufficiently faithful ex vivo human-derived experimental models for circuit testing. However, my softest spot is always reserved for elegant molecular designs that make me wonder why I didn't think of them before.