Hendrik Luesch Ph.D.
Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry; Debbie and Sylvia DeSantis Chair in Natural Products Drug Discovery and Development
About Hendrik Luesch
Hendrik Luesch, Ph.D., a professor of medicinal chemistry, received his Diplom in Chemistry at the University of Siegen (Germany) in 1997. He attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa to study marine natural products chemistry and obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Richard E. Moore in 2002. He then undertook three years of postdoctoral studies as an Irving S. Sigal Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla working with Professor Peter G. Schultz in the area of functional genomics and chemical biology. In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Florida as an assistant professor and was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2010 and to full professor in 2015. He combines his interest in marine natural products chemistry with genomics and proteomics approaches for the discovery and characterization of potential drugs and molecular drug targets.
Research Profile
Dr. Luesch’s multidisciplinary research program at the interface of chemistry and biology combines classical natural products chemistry with high-throughput screening and chemical genomics. It involves most aspects of drug discovery ranging from the collection of promising marine organisms, bioassay development, NMR spectroscopic structure determination, total synthesis, mechanism-of-action studies, and pharmacology, up to the preclinical and clinical development of candidate molecules. His lab is producing a small but increasing pipeline of bioactive compounds that are at various developmental stages. He also uses functional genomics approaches to identify and characterize genes associated with disease processes, especially cancer.
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