R. Kip Guy, PhD

Dean & Professor

Dr. R. Kip Guy is the Dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky and a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Dr. Guy obtained his BA in chemistry from Reed College in Portland, OR in 1990. After college, he worked as a process development chemist in the Process Translation Unit at IBM-Almaden in San Jose, CA. In 1996, he received his PhD in Organic Chemistry based on the total synthesis of taxol from the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, CA. While at Scripps he held an Office of Naval Research Graduate Research Fellowship, George Hewitt Medical Research Fellowship, and ACS Organic Division Fellowship. He also carried out additional training in Physiology at the Woods Hole Research Institute in Woods Hole, MA in 1995. From 1996 to 1998, he was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow in Cellular Biology, focusing on the relationship between hedgehog signaling and sterol homeostasis with Drs. Brown and Goldstein at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX.

In 1998 he joined UCSF as an Assistant Professor with joint appointments in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology. In 2005 he was promoted directly to Full Professor. In 2002 he founded the Center for Chemical Diversity at UCSF, which provided access to high throughput chemistry to the campus. In 2003 he founded the Bay Area Screening Center, a joint endeavor between UCSF and the Gallo Institute that provided high throughput screening. These were subsequently merged into the Small Molecule Discovery Center, which is still in operation at UCSF. In 2005, he was recruited to St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, to found and chair the new department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics, where he was the Robert J. Ulrich Chair in Chemical Biology and Therapeutics. He has held adjunct academic positions at UCSF (Adjunct Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry), the University of Tennessee (Adjunct Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pathology), and Vanderbilt University (Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry).

In 2016, he moved to the University of Kentucky as Dean of the College of Pharmacy and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and in 2023, he won the Phil Portoghese Award for Medicinal Chemistry from the ACS.

His primary interests are in evidence-based practice, health disparities, pharmacy education, and drug discovery. His research is focused on the discovery and development of novel small molecules for orphan diseases, particularly small-morbidity oncology and protozoal infectious diseases. Most of his group’s work falls into the areas of chemical validation of novel targets, lead discovery and optimization of novel chemical matter for validated disease targets, and the use of non-targeted whole-cell strategies for lead discovery and optimization. He is the author of 202 papers and book chapters and the inventor on 27 issued patents.

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