In February 2022, Prof. VanNieuwenhze was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Fellows of the Academy are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology. They represent an honorific leadership with the American Society for Microbiology.
Michael VanNieuwenhze, Standiford H. Cox Professor of Chemistry, received his B.A. degree from Kalamazoo College in 1984 and his M.S. from Yale University in 1988. After obtaining his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1992 while working in the laboratories of Professor William Roush, he moved to The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California where he was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor K. Barry Sharpless (Nobel Laureate 2001 and 2022). In 1994, Professor VanNieuwenhze accepted a position in Discovery Chemistry Research at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis. In 2002, he accepted a faculty position at the University of California, San Diego and in 2007, he returned to the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University as Assistant Professor. Professor VanNieuwenhze was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, Full Professor in 2016, and was appointed the Standiford H. Cox Professor of Chemistry in 2018. He has recently been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Biology and Chemistry Divisions, 2019), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2021). His research is focused on development of methods for visualization of bacterial cell wall biosynthesis and cell division, the study of cyclic peptides that inhibit bacterial cell wall biosynthesis, and the development of core-protein modulators for the treatment of hepatitis B.