Kerwin Sean M
Editor-in-Chief
Associate Professor, Department of Medicinal Chemistry
University of Texas, USA
Sean Kerwin obtained his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his postdoctoral training in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. He joined the faculty of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996. Dr. Kerwin’s laboratory carries out research focusing on natural product total synthesis and structure-activity relationships, DNA-interactive natural products and analogs, and the design and synthesis of natural product-inspired libraries. Notable contributions from Dr. Kerwin’s research group include the discovery of nucleoside and non-nucleoside telomerase inhibitors, the identification of natural product recognition site-directed kinase inhibitors, and the design of novel diradical- and carbene-generating cyclizations inspired by the enediyne class of natural products.
•Mechanism of action studies of natural products, especially plant-derived (poly)phenols and cyctotoxic terrestrial, marine, and microbial secondary metabolites.
• Synthetic methods development, especially cascade cyclizations and cross-coupling reactions involving alkynes.
• Computational chemistry including DFT and post-Hartree-Fock methods, docking, and pharmacophore hypothesis generation.
• Studies of DNA-binding and –cleaving agents, especially those targeting higher-order (e.g., G-quadruplex) structures.
