Conference Program and Schedule
118th Annual Meeting of The North Carolina Academy of Sciences – March 18-19, 2022
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Jonathan Chekan, Ph.D.
Jonathan R. Chekan is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His interdisciplinary research program is focused on the discovery, biosynthesis, and engineering of bioactive molecules from nature. These natural products have been a critical source of new medicines ranging from antibiotics to anticancer compounds. Moreover, natural product biosynthetic pathways often contain unprecedented enzymatic transformations that inspire biochemists and chemists alike. Dr. Chekan’s Lab takes a bioinformatic-first approach to rapidly identify unstudied natural products with the ultimate goal of discovering new enzymatic reactions and bioactive natural products. His work has contributed to 24 scientific publications.
Dr. Chekan earned his B.S. in Microbiology from the Pennsylvania State University in 2011. He then moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joining the laboratory of Dr. Satish K. Nair. In 2016, Dr. Chekan graduated from UIUC with a Ph.D. in biochemistry and joined the laboratory of Dr. Bradley S. Moore at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego) as a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow of the Life Science Research Foundation. In Fall 2020, Dr. Chekan joined the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina Greensboro as an Assistant Professor.