Jon Thorson, PhD

Professor and Chief Research Officer

Jon received his B.A. degree in chemistry (1986) from Augsburg College and a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry (1993) from the University of Minnesota with Professor Hung-wen (Ben) Liu. He held a postdoctoral appointment as a Merck Postdoctoral Fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation (1993-1996) at the University of California, Berkeley with Professor Peter Schultz. From 1996-2001, Jon held appointments as an assistant member of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and assistant professor of Sloan-Kettering Division, Joan and Sanford I. Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Cornell University. In 2001 Professor Thorson moved to the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy and during his tenure with UW, Jon was instrumental in establishing the Wisconsin Center for Natural Products Research, the NCI-supported UW National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group, the NATPRO Protein Structure Initiative, and co-founded the Madison-based biotechnology company Centrose.

Professor Thorson joined the UK College of Pharmacy in the Fall of 2011 as the first director of the new UK Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation (2011-2020), interim co-director of the Markey Cancer Center’s Drug Discovery, Delivery, and Translational Therapeutics Program (2012-2015) and co-director of the Drug Discovery and Development Module in the UK Center for Clinical and Translational Science (2012-present). Under Professor Thorson’s leadership, CPRI developed into an NIGMS-supported P20 Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE, 2020-present). Jon was named a University Research Professor (2018) and also serves as the associate dean of research/chief scientific officer for the College of Pharmacy (2020-present).

Professor Thorson’s research interests include chemical biology, the discovery and application of natural products and biocatalysts, biosynthesis and mechanistic enzymology and enzyme engineering and evolution. The Thorson group has also been credited with pioneering strategies for natural product and small molecule glycorandomization.

PUBLICATIONS