PAUL HERGENROTHER, PHD

Professor Hergenrother’s research focuses on the design and evaluation of novel small molecules for the treatment of intractable diseases. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Vanquish Oncology, and an anticancer compound discovered by his lab is being evaluated in clinical trials in cancer patients.

Professor Hergenrother joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 2001. At the University, he is the Leader of the Theme “Anticancer Discovery from Pets to People” at the Institute for Genomic Biology, and is the Director of the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Grant. He was the recipient of the 2016 Innovation Transfer Award from the University, was named as an American Cancer Society Research Scholar, and was named by Technology Review magazine as one of the top innovators under the age of 35. More recently, he was named as the recipient of the 2016 UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, a 2017 ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, and the 2018 ACS Sosnovsky Award for Cancer Research.

Professor Hergenrother received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University.