The Frank J. Welcher Lectureship series was established to honor and celebrate Dr. Welcher’s legacy and commitment to the IUPUI (now IUI) Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology. This year’s Frank J. Welcher awardee is Professor Scott J. Miller, a Yale University Sterling Professor of Chemistry.
Dr. Miller has received numerous awards for his research and teaching, is widely published, and is the current Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Organic Chemistry. His awardee presentation is entitled “Basic Chemistry and One Interface with Medicine, Pharma and Biotech.” It will be presented in IT 152 at 3:15 PM on November 21st. Dr. Miller’s talk will discuss the contributions of basic chemistry – primarily synthetic chemistry – to human medicine. He will show how the discovery of new reactions, catalysts and strategies can lead to the identification of new drugs and their production on scale. Sometimes taking cues from Nature’s problem-solving approach, Dr. Miller will illustrate the importance of careful design and mechanistic analysis, coupled with robust experimentation, in achieving selective chemistry in complex molecular environments.