Jonathan A. Ellman

Biosketch

Jonathan Ellman is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry and a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University. He earned a BS in chemistry from MIT and a PhD in chemistry from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in chemical biology at the University of California at Berkeley and in 1992 joined the Department of Chemistry at the same institution. In 1999 he also became affiliated with the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco. In 2010 he moved to Yale where he served as the Divisional Director of Physical Sciences and Engineering from 2012-2014. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Awards include the Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods and the Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, the Pedler Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Society of Biomolecular Screening Achievement Award, the Scheele Award selected by the Swedish Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and the Yale Dylan Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences.

Research Interests

Jonathan Ellman’s lab has focused on the development and application of chemical biology tools and synthetic chemistry approaches for the discovery and production of agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Ellman and his coworkers were instrumental in advancing combinatorial chemistry and high throughput parallel synthesis from biopolymers to non-oligomeric druglike small molecules. In collaboration with the Craik lab at UCSF they developed a positional scanning method for the rapid determination of the substrate specificity profiles of proteases, an approach that has been applied to hundreds of different enzymes. His lab currently collaborates with the Shoichet lab at UCSF to apply virtual screening to scaffolds developed in the Ellman lab for the identification of potent, selective, and pharmacologically active ligands to drug relevant receptors. Starting with a collaboration with Bergman at UC Berkeley, his lab pioneered and continues to investigate catalytic C-H bond functionalization for the synthesis and elaboration of nitrogen heterocycles. His lab also continues to investigate the synthesis, properties, and diverse applications of high oxidation state sulfur species, including the development of a chiral amine reagent that has been used for the discovery and/or production of a myriad of clinical candidates and many approved drugs.