JUSTIN DU BOIS APPOINTED AS INCOMING CHAIR FOR DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Professor Justin Du Bois, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical and Systems Biology, has been appointed by the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences to become the next Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University and will succeed Professor Steven G. Boxer on September 1st.
Professor Du Bois joined the Department of Chemistry at Stanford as an assistant professor in 1999. He leads a cutting‑edge research program at the intersection of chemistry and biology, which combines chemical design and synthesis with molecular biology and electrophysiology to investigate the function and physiology of voltage-gated ion channels. His lab has a particular interest in the underlying disease etiology of neuropathic pain and epilepsy, and the causative link to ion channel malfunction. In the early part of his career, Du Bois’ lab developed selective methods and efficient catalysts for C–H bond oxidation, technologies that were used to access complex natural products, including toxins that serve as useful tool compounds to study ion channels.
Professor Du Bois is a member of the scientific advisory board for the Life Sciences Institute (LSI) at the University of Michigan. He was a founding member of the NSF Center for Selective C-H Functionalization, a former executive committee member of Sarafan ChEM-H, and the founder of the Center for Molecular Analysis and Design (CMAD) at Stanford University. He has served as a scientific consultant for numerous pharmaceutical companies, including Gilead Sciences and Pfizer, Inc. In 2010, he and his former coworker, John Mulcahy, cofounded SiteOne Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical start-up aimed at developing next-generation analgesic medicines (the company was recently acquired by Eli Lilly). He is also a decorated teacher, having been awarded the Walter J. Gores Award, the highest distinction for teaching at Stanford, and currently holds the title of Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
A special thanks to our outgoing Department Chair, Steven G. Boxer, the Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry, for his significant contributions to the department and leadership through the pandemic. Professor Boxer, a biophysical chemist and a world-leading expert in using vibrational Stark spectroscopy and related physical chemistry techniques to quantify and map electric fields inside proteins and understand molecular function at a mechanistic level, has served in this role since 2020.