24 talented Chemistry & Biochemistry graduate students have been awarded the 2022 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).
The awards were presented to our students at our annual departmental awards ceremony on May 13, 2022. Congratulations to all the recipients listed below!
Top row, from left: Jun Shen (P. Weiss group), Luca McDermott Catena (Garg group), Dominick Witkowski (Garg group), Cindy Wang (S. Clarke group), Jose Moreno (Kwon group), Roberto Chavez (Garcia-Garibay group), Austin Ready (Spokoyny group), Reid Wilson (Schwartz group), Noelle Alexa Novales (C. Clarke group), Yueying Wang (Spokoyny group). Bottom row, from left: Casey Cornwell (Tolbert group), Helen Cumberbatch (Tolbert group), Caitlyn Fick (Sletten group), Nathaniel Johnston (Alexandrova group), Spencer Hamilton (Tolbert group), Kenneth Mei (Schwartz group).
Students not present at ceremony: (Left to right) Keaton Barr (Chanfreau group), Katherine Estoque (Tolbert group), Rongli Liu (Duan group), Charlene Salamat (Tolbert group), Maya Segal (S. Weiss group), Alex Simafranca (Tolbert group), Arismel Tena Meza (Garg group), and Jillian Williams (Caram group).
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 the University of California Presidential Chair in Medicinal Chemistry and a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. An authority on synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry, Jung consults for several industrial labs 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 have 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 hundreds of thousands of patients. In addition, Jung has founded 14 biotech startup companies. He has supervised 94 Ph.D. and nine Masters theses and has taught 145 postdoctoral scholars. He has published more than 370 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 2022, Jung was awarded the IUPAC-Richter Prize in Medicinal Chemistry.
Read about this year’s other graduate student award recipients at the links below:
2022 Excellence in Research Awards
2022 Jim and Barbara Tsay Excellence in Second Year Research and Academics Awards
2022 Ralph & Charlene Bauer Graduate Student Awards
2022 Foote Senior Fellows
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
