Speaker

Dr. John MacMillan, PhD

Vice Chancellor for Research

Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry 

University of California, Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California

Dr. John MacMillan is the Vice Chancellor for Research and is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where his research laboratory focuses on the discovery and characterization of biologically active molecules from microorganisms. This research has focused predominately on the therapeutic areas of infectious disease and oncology, combining phenotypic screening, isolation and mechanism of action studies towards the discovery of more than 100 new natural products. His collaborative work in the area of oncology has led to Welireg, a first in-class inhibitor of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 2 (HIF-2) that is currently approved for treatment of VHL syndrome and renal cell carcinoma. The MacMillan labs work in the area of natural products mechanism of action has yielded multiple approaches, such as FUSION, to look at the mechanism of natural products on a library scale. This work has led to establishment of the Center for High Functional Annotation of Natural Products (HIFAN), which is a multi-institutional center funded by the NIH to study the mechanism of botanicals and natural products.

Dr. MacMillan holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Davis and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Iowa. He was a post-doctoral research associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Prior to moving to the University of California, Santa Cruz he was on faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center where he was the Chilton/Bell Scholar in Biochemistry and the holder of the Martha Steiner Chair in Biomedical Sciences.

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