In honor of Professor Iwao Ojima’s 80th birthday on June 5, the Ojima Laboratory alumni organized a two-day symposium at State University of New York at Stony Brook on June 6 and 7, 2025: The “2025 Symposium on Research and Innovation at the Interface of Chemistry, Biology and Medicine”.
Dr. Iwao Ojima received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. (1973) degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He joined the Sagami Institute of Chemical Research and held a position of 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 Distinguished Professor (1995). He served as the Department Chairman from 1997 to 2003. He has been serving as the founding Director for the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB&DD) from 2003. He also serves as the President of the State University of New York at Stony Brook Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors from 2015.
He has a wide range of research interests in synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry as well as chemical biology, including discovery and development of anticancer agents and antimicrobials, targeted drug delivery, catalytic methodologies and asymmetric synthesis. His awards and honors include Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1994), E. B. Hershberg Award for Important Discoveries of Medicinally Active Substances (2001), the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame (2006), ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry (2013) and Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products (2019) from the American Chemical Society; The Chemical Society of Japan Award (1999); Outstanding Inventor Award (2002) from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York; Fellows of 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), the National Academy of Inventors (2014), and European Academy of Sciences (2020).
He has advised 145 graduate students (80 Ph.D. degrees and 44 M.S. degrees), 75 postdoctoral research associates/ fellows, 17 visiting scientists, 130 undergraduate research students, and 84 high school summer research students (many of them won Westinghouse, Intel, Regeneron and Siemens Science Competitions, including Grand Prize) by December 2024.A PDF of the Symposium brochure is available at this link.
