The Department of Medicinal Chemistry is located at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy and is an integral part of UF Health. The strategic location within the Health Science Center facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations and close interactions with clinicians, which catalyzes the translation from bench to bedside.
Our faculty teach in both Pharm.D. and the departmental Ph.D. program. Several faculty are also teaching in our online M.S. Pharmaceutical Sciences program. Our graduate students get exposed to the entire life cycle of a drug by participating in college-wide activities and receive outstanding in-depth training in multi-stage drug design, discovery and development (D3), equipped with the knowledge and skills of modern medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.
The department has excellent facilities dedicated to major areas of medicinal chemistry research, and our faculty has been highly successful in attracting extramural research support. UF’s preeminence initiative in drug discovery and development has supported an expansion of the department in focus research areas such as natural products, structure-based drug design and the latest AI-enabled drug discovery and invested in major therapeutic areas, including cancer, neurological diseases, drug abuse and pain research. The department is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary with expertise in chemistry, physics, biology, pharmacology, computational and AI/deep learning.
Our impressive natural products inspired program encompasses the entire spectrum of multidisciplinary research from genomes to drugs, including genome mining, biosynthetic engineering, chemical synthesis and biological profiling of natural products and natural product-like compounds, leading to the corresponding in vitro and in vivo pharmacology, mechanistic studies, and preclinical evaluation of drug candidates. Several such lead compounds have been licensed by pharmaceutical companies. Our AI-based research cluster has been developing computational models/platforms for novel targeting identification, lead generation and optimization and protein/enzyme design targeting both protein and RNA.
With many more therapeutic compounds ranging from natural products, synthetic small molecules, induced proximity compounds to peptides and proteins, utilizing target-based, phenotypic or virtual screenings as well as genome scanning as starting points, our research platform provides exciting research and career development opportunities to our graduate students, postdocs and research scientists, etc.
Chenglong Li, Ph.D.
Nicholas Bodor Professor in Drug Discovery | Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicinal Chemistry