17 talented Chemistry & Biochemistry graduate students have been awarded the 2021 Michael E Jung Excellence in Teaching Awards.
These awards are given to students who have excelled as teaching assistants (TAs), as reflected in undergraduate student evaluations and faculty nomination letters. The award honors Professor Michael Jung, who is one of our department’s greatest educators. Jung has been recognized with major teaching awards, including the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award (1978), UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Prize (1986, as the inaugural awardee), and the department’s Hanson-Dow Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching (1992).
Congratulations to all the recipients listed below!
From top left, clockwise: Ana Bulger (Garg group), Jared Cellini (S. Weiss group), Katherine Estoque (Tolbert group), Hannah Friedman (Caram group), Madeline Gelb (Maynard group), Michael Guile (C. Clarke lab), Omar Leon (Schwartz group), Liubo Li (Harran group), Matt McVeigh (Garg group), Zerina Mehmedović (Schwartz group), Ben Natinsky (Liu group), Bosi Peng (Duan group), Andrew Salmon (Ruben group), Dane Stanfield (Schwartz group), Stephanie Tenney (Caram group), Kelly Wong (Sletten group), and Laura Wonilowicz (Garg group).
These awards are normally presented to our students at our annual departmental awards ceremony, which has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
About Professor Michael Jung
Professor Michael Jung received his B.A. in 1969 from Rice University and his Ph.D. in 1973 from Columbia University, where he worked with Gilbert Stork as an NSF Fellow. After a one-year NATO postdoctoral fellowship with Albert Eschenmoser at the ETH in Zurich, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 1974, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. An authority on synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry, Jung consults for several industrial laboratories in both biotech and big pharma settings. He has more than 420 patents and/or patent applications arising from both his consulting activities and his own research. Recently Jung has expanded his role in medicinal chemistry at UCLA and has more than 15 ongoing collaborations. Two compounds from his lab has been FDA approved and are on the market: Xtandi, approved in 2012 for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), and Erleada, approved in 2018 for the treatment of pre-metastatic CRPC. These drugs have extended the lives of thousands of patients. In addition, Jung has founded 13 biotech startup companies. He has supervised 94 Ph.D. and nine Masters theses and has taught 134 postdoctoral scholars. He has published more than 365 articles and given over 650 lectures on his research.
In 2017, Jung and his wife, Alice, endowed the Michael and Alice Jung Chair in Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery to enable UCLA to hire a faculty member who will conduct drug discovery research with the goal of producing effective new pharmaceuticals. In 2020, Jung was named the UC Presidential Chair in Medicinal Chemistry.
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Read about this year’s other graduate student award recipients at the links below:
2021 Ralph & Charlene Bauer Awards
2021 Jim and Barbara Tsay Excellence in Second Year Research and Academics Awards
2021 Graduate Student Commencement Awards
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
