March 29, 2006
Alexander Tropsha, PhD, has been named chair of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products. He has served as interim chair of the division since last July.
“I am delighted to announce Dr. Tropsha’s new position,” said Robert Blouin, dean of the School. “Dr. Tropsha has been a faculty member at the School for more than ten years, and he has done an excellent job of providing leadership for the division since last summer.”
Tropsha is a professor of medicinal chemistry and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling at the School of Pharmacy. He directs the UNC Graduate Program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and has served as associate director of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences. Tropsha received his MS degree in chemical enzymology in 1982 and his PhD in biochemistry and pharmacology in 1986, both from Moscow State University.
Tropsha immigrated to the United States in 1989. In 1991, after two years of postdoctoral research at UNC, he joined the School of Pharmacy as an assistant professor and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling. His current research interests include computer-aided drug design (ligand-based and structure-based design methods), chemoinformatics (quantitative structure activity relationships, combinatorial library design, and database mining), structural bioinformatics (protein structure analysis and prediction, identification of structural and functional protein motifs), and molecular simulations of proteins and peptides.
Tropsha is a member of several editorial boards, including the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. He is a permanent member of the National Institutes of Health Biodata Management and Analysis Study Section, and is an elected member of the Board and vice-chair of the International QSAR and Modeling Society. The research in Tropsha’s laboratory is supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and pharmaceutical companies. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.
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