KINGSTON, RI — April 2, 2019 — The University of Rhode Island’s Alexander Cruikshank Lecture will feature Michael E. Jung, a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

During his visit Monday, April 29, Jung will give two lectures. The first, “A New Mechanistic Paradigm for a Class of Broad Spectrum Antivirals, Active against Enveloped Viruses,” will begin at 2 p.m. in the Richard E. Beaupre Center for Chemical & Forensic Sciences, 140 Flagg Road, Kingston Campus, Room 105. The second lecture, “Drug Discovery in Academia: Successful Case Studies,” will also be in Beaupre, but in Room 100, and will begin at 5:30 p.m. Both talks are free and open to the public.

Jung is a lead researcher at UCLA, where he has so far generated $1.14 billion in research funding for the university. Jung earned his bachelor of arts in 1969 from Rice University, and then his doctorate in 1973 from Columbia. After a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with Albert Eschenmoser at a research University in Zurich, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 1974. He is now a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at UCLA.

Jung has served as a reviewer of proposals for the National Science Foundation (NSF), Purdue Research Foundation (PRF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medicinal Chemistry Study Section, and Research Corporation, among others. He is on the scientific advisory boards of several pharmaceutical firms and consults for more than 20 industrial laboratories. Jung is an authority on synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry and has more than 85 patents arising from both his consulting activities and his own research. He has co-founded nine biotech start-ups, and developed two compounds (Xtandi and Erleada) that have been approved and are now on the market. He has published more than 250 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has given more than 470 lectures on his research, including lectures in German and French.

The Alexander M. Cruickshank Endowed Lectureship was established in 1999 to educate the URI community in the subjects of chemistry, physics and biology. Cruickshank was a chemistry professor at URI for 30 years, where he strove to foster an environment in which his students could share their scientific ideas and build lifelong friendships. In 1976, he was promoted to chair of the Department of Chemistry. During his time at URI, Cruickshank additionally became the director of the Gordon Research Conferences, an international forum for the presentation and discussion of leading research in the biological, chemical, physical and engineering sciences. He retired in 1993, and died in 2017 at the age of 97 after many years of service to URI and the scientific community..

This series is sponsored by URI Department of Chemistry, URI Department of Arts and Sciences, and the Gordon Research Conferences.

This story was written by Lauren Poirier, a sophomore English and Public Relations major and intern at the University’s Department of Marketing and Communications.