2024 Portoghese Lectureship Awards

The annual Portoghese Lectureship Awards recognize two early-career researchers who have displayed impact and/or promise of impact to the field of medicinal chemistry. This award is presented jointly by the Editors of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, and the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry (MEDI).

Learn more about this year's winners, Prof. Matthias Gehringer and Prof. Amanda Wolfe, as they present their research in this webinar moderated by the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Editor-in-Chief Prof. Craig Lindsley, and ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry Vice Chair Nicole Goodwin.

Speakers

Prof. Matthias Gehringer- Matthias studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany), the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (ENSCM; France), and the University of Heidelberg (Germany). He obtained his doctorate from the University of Tübingen (Germany) where he worked on reversible and irreversible inhibitors of the protein kinase JAK3. As a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, he focused on the total synthesis of complex natural products from the mycolactone family. In 2019, he was appointed Assistant Professor for Medicinal Chemistry at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tübingen, and Associate Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence "Image Guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies (iFIT)". His research is in the areas of Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology focuses primarily on covalent protein kinase inhibitors and novel approaches for the covalent targeting of cysteine and other amino acids.

Prof. Amanda Wolfe- Amanda began her chemistry career as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, working in Professor Christian Melander’s laboratory on the development of 2-aminoimidazole bacterial biofilm inhibitors. She then attended graduate school at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California where she worked in Professor Dale Boger’s laboratory on the synthesis and evaluation of anti-cancer prodrugs derived from the duocarmycin family of natural products. Amanda then began her independent career at the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville) in 2013 as an Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and earned tenure in 2018. In 2022, Amanda was designated as the GlaxoSmithKline Distinguished Professor in Molecular and Chemical Biology and promoted to full Professor in 2023. At UNC Asheville, researchers in the Wolfe laboratory, which has had 58 undergraduate, 4 high school, and 2 post-doctoral researchers to date, broadly focus on small molecule antibiotic development targeting multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii. The Wolfe laboratory has been funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.