The Department of Medicinal Chemistry is part of the highly collaborative, interdisciplinary School of Pharmacy. Our research in Medicinal Chemistry encompasses questions related to drug metabolism and disposition, drug design, and disease mechanism. We deviate somewhat from the discipline's traditional focus solely on organic synthetic chemistry in support of drug discovery and optimization. Instead, broadly speaking, we seek to understand how drugs and toxins interact with their biological targets and with detoxifying enzymes and transporters, as well as to uncover the chemical and biochemical bases of cardiovascular, degenerative, developmental, and infectious diseases.

Students in our PhD program work closely with faculty and collaborators in academia and the biotech/pharma industry. Recent graduates have tackled questions ranging from “Is there an early warning signal for heart attacks?” to “Why are viruses so good at evading vaccines?”, and from “How does the body defend against Alzheimer’s disease?” to “How have drug metabolizing enzymes evolved to be so promiscuous?” Students benefit from hands-on access to our state-of-the-art Mass Spectrometry Core, the unparalleled research environment across the UW Seattle campus, and access to NIH-funded pre-doctoral training programs for more focused study in areas such as Pharmacological Sciences and Molecular Biophysics.