Vanderbilt University’s Craig Lindsley, Ph.D., is the 2013 recipient of the Philip S. Portoghese Lectureship, awarded jointly by the Journal of Medicinal Chemistryand the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Medicinal Chemistry.
The award, named for the journal’s former editor-in-chief, honors individuals who have had a “major impact” on medicinal chemistry research. It will be presented Sept. 10 during the society’s fall meeting in Indianapolis.
Lindsley, director of Medicinal Chemistry in the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, said the award was a “true honor” that reflected not only his contributions but those of “phenomenal colleagues across all drug discovery disciplines” in the center.
“I think this award speaks very highly of medicinal chemistry at Vanderbilt, and further recognizes Vanderbilt as a major and impactful player in academic drug discovery,” he added.
Lindsley, the William K. Warren Jr. Chair in Medicine and professor of Pharmacology and Chemistry, is widely recognized as a pioneer who brought technology-enabled synthesis to the forefront of drug discovery chemistry.
Using the technology platform he developed, Lindsley has discovered and developed high quality novel compounds in multiple therapeutic areas, from cancer to neuroscience, and pioneered the medicinal chemistry of allosteric modulation.
He directs the Vanderbilt Specialized Chemistry Center for Accelerated Probe Development, part of the National Institutes of Health Molecular Library Probe Production Centers Network, and is editor-in-chief of the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.
After earning his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1996, Lindsley did postgraduate research at Harvard University before joining the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2006, he was recruited to Vanderbilt from Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, Pa., where he was senior research fellow and group leader in medicinal chemistry.
