Dr Timothy Wencewicz, winner of the 2024 St Louis Award
Tabbatha Bohac, past chair of the St Louis Section–ACS and chair of the award jury, has announced the winner of the 2024 St Louis Section ACS Award: Timothy Wencewicz, Professor of Chemistry at Washington University.
Dr Wencewicz obtained a BS in Chemistry and Applied Mathematics from Southeast Missouri State University in 2006 and earned his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2011 working for Professor Marvin J Miller on siderophore-antibiotic conjugates for targeted drug delivery. He then went to Harvard Medical School to pursue postdoctoral training with Professor Christopher T Walsh on elucidating enzymatic mechanisms for natural product biosynthesis and antibiotic resistance.
Dr Wencewicz started his independent career as an Assistant Professor at Washington University in 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. He has focused on addressing the antibiotic resistance crisis by studying the biosynthesis of natural products and elucidating new antibiotic strategies. He discovered the first β-lactone synthase using a genome-mining and enzyme-reconstitution approach, leading to the chemoenzymatic production of new analogs as potential drugs. He also discovered that certain β-lactam antibiotics function as mechanism-based transition-state inhibitors that can be adapted as warheads for the design of new drugs. In an elegant set of experiments, he mapped the enzymatic pathway to one of the most important drugs for treating iron overload diseases, commonly known as Desferal. This led him to elucidate a new paradigm for how bacteria can acquire iron from human blood, which he used to develop inhibitors that starve them of essential iron. Among other important advances, he discovered how certain bacteria destroy tetracycline, and developed inhibitors that block this process and restore its effectiveness against resistant strains.
Wencewicz has published more than 50 scholarly works and presented over 55 invited seminars. He has organized numerous conference symposia and was recently elected co-chair of the 2026 Enzyme Mechanisms Conference. He is co-author of a leading textbook on antibiotics published by Wiley and volume editor for Methods in Enzymology. He has won numerous awards (including this one) and secured research funding from the NIH, NSF, and private foundations. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Southeast Missouri University Foundation and on the editorial boards for the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the Journal of Antibiotics. He is a reviewer for many interdisciplinary chemical biology journals as well as funding agencies.
Timothy Wencewicz has demonstrated his deep commitment to graduate education through his activities with graduate admissions, recruiting, and mentoring in the College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Medicine. He was appointed Washington University Director of Graduate Studies in 2022, and serves as a standing member of the Interview Committee for the MD-PhD Medical Scientists Training Program and the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology PhD programs and is Chair of the Admissions Committee in Chemistry. He has organized workshops on grant writing, fellowship applications, and graduate mentoring. His community outreach includes organizing on-site career panels at Bayer and Sigma, providing continuing education for high school science teachers, and promoting science to K-12 through interactive science demonstrations and career fairs. Dr Wencewicz has mentored 3 postdocs, 20 PhD students and 26 undergraduates.
The Saint Louis Section ACS Award, originally sponsored by the Monsanto Company (now Bayer) and administered by the Saint Louis Section–ACS, is presented to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of chemistry and demonstrated potential to further the advancement of the chemical profession. The award, consisting of a $1,500 honorarium and a plaque, will be presented at the Saint Louis Award Banquet, which usually follows the Award Symposium which is currently scheduled for Friday, November 1, 2024. Details will follow.
“Computers and the physics of complex biological systems”
