Director's Message
The Program in Chemical Biology (PCB) program at UMass Chan Medical School is focused on harnessing the techniques of Chemistry and Biology to answer fundamental questions in biology. Our faculty take a multidisciplinary approach to solving these problems and utilize a multitude of techniques including small molecule synthesis, medicinal chemistry, enzymology, diagnostics, and structural biology.
Our program includes more than 40 faculty from Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, Radiology, Cancer Biology, Orthopedics, Neuroscience, and the RNA Therapeutics Institute. The research interests of our faculty encompass antibiotic resistance, viral pathogenesis, cancer biology, and immunology.
The program has excellent infrastructure and the resources needed for synthetic chemistry with over 40 chemical hoods, 500 and 600 MHz NMR spectrometers, and in-house facilities for mass spectrometry (small molecule and proteomics), imaging (fluorescence and electron microscopy), and high-throughput screening. Additionally, we have excellent resources to promote structural biology including in house diffractometers and state of the are cryo-electron microscopes.
The Program in Chemical Biology also includes a Chemical Biology track for graduate students that is run through the umbrella program of the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Once accepted, students with chemical backgrounds and inclinations are encouraged to rotate in a variety of laboratories to find an area of chemical biology that interests them. The Program offers a Chemical Biology course that ranges from the basics of nucleophiles and electrophiles in biology to state-of-the-art approaches used by chemists to dissect biological and cellular processes at the molecular level.
Paul Thompson
Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology
Follow the links for more information on the Program in Chemical Biology
Faculty Publications Coursework Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences umbrella program