Wilfred van der Donk’s research program focuses on the discovery and design of new antibiotics and natural products. These projects combine synthetic organic and protein chemistry to address problems at the interface of chemistry and biology.
Professor van der Donk received his B.S. from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 1989 and his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1994. He went on to do postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and joined the faculty at Illinois in 1997. In 2008, he was appointed as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research interests are in organic chemistry and chemical biology.