Tu Youyou Award

Professor William Gerwick’s research focuses on the natural products of marine algae and cyanobacteria, their application in medicine, their biosynthesis using genomic approaches, and innovative methods in the structure elucidation of natural products.
He received his BS degree from the University of California at Davis, his PhD from the University of California at San Diego, and conducted postdoctoral work at the University of Connecticut. After a junior faculty position at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico, he spent 21 years as Professor of Pharmacy at Oregon State University. In 2005, he returned to his PhD institution at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC San Diego, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Oceanography and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Professor Gerwick has served as president of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, chaired and co-chaired several major research conferences, and worked as an associate editor for the Journal of Natural Products. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the American Society of Pharmacognosy. He has trained over 100 doctoral and postdoctoral students, and his research group has published nearly 500 papers and more than 25 patents.