Foote group postdoctoral alumnus Professor Alexander Greer (Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY) has been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Photochemistry and Photobiology.
Photochemistry and Photobiology is the official journal of the American Society for Photobiology and is published by Wiley. The journal was established in 1962 and focuses on interactions of light with molecules, cells, and tissue and resultant biological responses, covering the fields of chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine. Greer took on the role of EIC on October 31, 2024. Prior to that he served as an Associate Editor of the journal for 15 years.
Greer received his B.S. at CSU, Chico, and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Wyoming. In the late nineties, Greer was a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Christopher Foote’s group at UCLA. He first met Foote at an American Society for Photobiology meeting in Atlanta in 1996. In Foote’s group, he studied the organic chemistry of singlet oxygen, including mechanistic details of perepoxides, dioxetanes, and endoperoxides. His work also focused on a perepoxide mimic in the singlet oxygen-ene reaction, an episulfoxide that was stable enough to detect by low temperature fast-atom bombardment mass and NMR spectroscopy. He joined the Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY faculty in September 1999, where he teaches both Sophomore Organic Chemistry and Advanced Organic Chemistry.
His research focuses on fundamental photochemistry including selective oxidations, photo-to-post-illumination processing, compound adjuvanticity, and singlet-oxygen priming for improved bacterial disinfection and cell eradication. Indeed, he just had his 13th Ph.D. student graduate from his group with a thesis title of “Mechanistic, Biochemical, and Theoretical Studies of Phototoxicity and Photobluing”. He also has interests in applied photoscience, co-founding SingletO2 Therapeutics LLC for singlet oxygen and disinfection technologies in oral and wound care.
Photo credit: Julia R. Greer