Professor Michael Jung, UCLA’s Walter and Shirley Wang Chair in Medicinal Drug Discovery, has been selected as one of three alumni from Rice University’s Weiss School of Natural Sciences to receive the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award.
The annual awards honor outstanding professional and societal achievements of distinguished and recent school alumni and will be presented at the Rice University’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences’ 50th anniversary gala and awards dinner during the university’s Alumni Weekend Nov. 6-9, 2025.
From the Rice University announcement:
Natural Sciences honors Jung ’69, van der Donk ’94, Bhaduri ’10
School will present 2025 alumni awards homecoming weekend
Michael Jung ’69, Wilfred van der Donk ’94 and Aparna Bhaduri ’10 have received 2025 Alumni Awards from Rice University’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences.
The annual awards honor outstanding professional and societal achievements of distinguished and recent school alumni and will be presented at the school’s 50th anniversary gala and awards dinner during Alumni Weekend Nov. 6-9.
Michael Jung ’69
2025 Distinguished Alumni Award
Jung, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Rice, is being honored for groundbreaking contributions in medicinal chemistry, including the development of FDA-approved therapies that have extended the lives of hundreds of thousands of prostate cancer patients worldwide.
The Walter and Shirley Wang Chair in Medicinal Drug Discovery at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Jung is an inventor on more than 450 patents and patent applications and has collaborated on the design and synthesis of dozens of new drugs, including the prostate-cancer drugs enzalutamide and apalutamide, which are sold commercially as Xtandi and Erleada, respectively.
“I set up something that I jokingly called ‘UCLA pharma’,” Jung said. “The biologists come with good biology for certain diseases, and then, as medicinal chemists, we look at compounds and make them more active and make them patentable. I have about 15 collaborations with biologists, and we have four compounds in clinical trials right now.”
The winner of dozens of awards, including the National Academy of Sciences’ 2025 Award for Chemistry in Service of Society, Jung earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and trained as a postdoc at ETH Zurich in Switzerland before joining UCLA in 1974. He said his career could have been very different were it not for exceptional Rice mentors.
“The great thing about Rice is you got to know the professors intimately,” said Jung. “Ron Magid, who taught sophomore organic, was fabulous, as was Ron Sass. A young professor named Tom Cantrell put me into research, and I did that with a number of professors, including Dick Turner. It was fabulous. That one-on-one interaction was the advantage that Rice had over other places with maybe bigger names.”
Read the full announcement here.
