Contributors

John Flygare has taught or co-taught courses in organic chemistry, biochemistry, and medicinal chemistry at Stanford University since 1997, with a combined total enrollment of over 5,000 students. He is also a project leader at Genentech in South San Francisco where he leads drug discovery teams in disease areas including oncology, infectious diseases, and neurodegeneration. Several compounds from these programs are currently in human clinical trials. He received his PhD in organic chemistry from Northwestern University and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University.

Dmitry Koltun received his undergraduate education at Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences and his PhD degree from University of Minnesota with Prof. Thomas Hoye in 1999. He began his career at MediChem Life Sciences in Chicago, then moved to CV Therapeutics in Palo Alto, California. He is currently a senior research scientist in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Gilead Sciences in Foster City, California. He lives in Foster City, California with his wife Elena and daughters Vera and Sonya.

Jie Jack Li earned his PhD in organic chemistry in 1995 at Indiana University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, he worked as a medicinal chemist at Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb from 1997 to 2012. Since then he has been an associate professor of chemistry at the University of San Francisco, teaching organic and medicinal chemistry. He has published 23 books for specialist and lay audiences, covering topics ranging from organic and medicinal chemistry to the history of drug discovery.

Susan M. Miller received her PhD in organic chemistry and mechanistic enzymology from the University of California Berkeley. After postdoctoral work in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she joined the School of Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1993 where she is now professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. Her research interests lie broadly in mechanistic and structure/function studies of redox enzymes and enzymes involved in biosynthetic pathways for antimicrobials. She teaches aspects of mechanistic organic chemistry and enzymology in both professional pharmacy and graduate chemistry and biophysics programs.

Adam Renslo earned a BA in chemistry from St. Olaf College in 1993 and a PhD in organic chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. After postdoctoral studies at the Scripps Research Institute, he worked as a medicinal chemist in the pharmaceutical industry for 6 years. In 2006 he joined the faculty in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. His research interests include the development of new approaches for targeted drug delivery in infectious disease and cancer. He teaches synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry in both the professional pharmacy and graduate chemistry and chemical biology programs.