Iwao Ojima received his B.S. (1968), M.S. (1970), and Ph.D. (1973) degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He joined the Sagami Institute of Chemical Research and held a position as Senior Research Fellow until 1983. He joined the faculty at the Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Stony Brook first as Associate Professor (1983), was promoted to Professor (1984), Leading Professor (1991), and then to University Distinguished Professor (1995). He served as the Department Chairman from1997 to 2003. He serves as the founding Director for the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB&DD) at Stony Brook from 2003. He also serves as the President of the Stony Brook University Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors from 2015. He was a Visiting Professor at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon I, France (1989), The University of Tokyo, Japan (1996), The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA (1997), and Université de Paris XI, BIOCIS, Châtenay-Malabry, France (1997).
His research interests include medicinal chemistry and chemical biology (anticancer agents, tumor-targeted drug delivery, antibacterial agents, antifungal agents, anti-inflammatory/analgesic agents, enzyme inhibitors), catalytic asymmetric synthesis, organic synthesis by means of organometallic reagents and catalysts, peptidomimetics, b-lactam chemistry (applications of the b-lactam synthon method), and organofluorine chemistry (fluoroamino acids and peptides, fluorotaxoids, medicinal applications). He has published more than 500 papers and reviews in leading journals and more than l00 patents granted (47 US patents), edited 10 books (SciFinder lists >1,000 publications to his credits, Google Scholar indicates h-index of 91, total citation >36,500 by June 2024), and he has given more than 142 Plenary and Invited Lectures in international conferences and symposia by June 2024.
He is a recipient of the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1994), the E. B. Hershberg Award (for important discovery of medicinally active substances) (2001), the ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry (2013) and the Ernest Guenther Award (in the chemistry of natural products) (2019) from the American Chemical Society; The Chemical Society of Japan Award (for distinguished achievements) (1999) from the Chemical Society of Japan; Outstanding Inventor Award (2002) from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York. He was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame, American Chemical Society (2006).
He is an elected Fellow of the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1997), The New York Academy of Sciences (2000), the American Chemical Society (2010), National Academy of Inventors (2014) and European Academy of Sciences (2020).
He has served in various advisory committees for National Institutes of Health (National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of General Medical Sciences), National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. He has served as a member of the Executive Committee for the Division of Organic Chemistry and the Long Range Planning Committee for the Division of Medicinal Chemistry, American Chemical Society. He has organized and chaired numerous international and award symposiums at the American Chemical Society National Meetings.
He has served and has been serving as Editorial Advisory Board member of Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organometallics, Journal of Molecular Catalysis, Chemistry Letters, Anti-Cancer Agents in Medicinal Chemistry, Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Letters in Drug Design & Discovery, and Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan. He serves as the Senior Editor of “Future Medicinal Chemistry” and the Chief Editor of “Frontiers in Chemistry: Organic Chemistry”.
