The Medicinal Chemistry & Pharmacognosy Specialization

Medicinal chemistry is a great bridge between chemistry and biology, specifically in pharmaceutical sciences and looking at the beginning stages of drug discovery. From our coursework early on to the research I do every day, it really lets us see early drug discovery from multiple different angles. The reason why I love this place is because MedChem is not a single basic research object. You cannot just close the door and do your own work. You always need to collaborate with different people. There are many aspects that need to be done if you are handling a sophisticated MedChem project. One of the key reasons I moved to Ohio State about five years ago was the highly collaborative environment that allows basic scientists like myself, involved in the design, synthesis, and studies of small molecules, to work with other biomedical scientists on campus that are experts in disease models and studies of clinical samples from patients that we see in our hospital. These collaborations push the boundaries of drug discovery and bring us closer to more effective therapeutics. One of the things that's really interesting about medicinal chemistry in general, it is applicable to a wide variety of career paths and part of that is just the skills that you learn. You're learning basic chemistry skills, you're learning pharmacology and biological skills, you're also learning more specific things like computational chemistry, you learn about natural products. What it does is it prepares you to problem solve in a lot of different ways. So the medicinal chemistry faculties are very open-minded and allow people to try different technologies back as students and this is fantastic because as a student if you learn this many technologies and skill sets you're building up the portfolio for yourself. Students need to understand how is science being done in industry, how is science being done by the best labs in the world, and so having access to state-of-the-art equipment, state-of-the-art facilities, really is sort of foundational for people to be able to do great work. Over the past five years I helped build our new high throughput screening laboratory in the College of Pharmacy. This facility enables state-of-the-art capabilities for drug discovery research. What we do in MedChem is actually the early stages of drug development and it could take like almost 20 years for a drug to actually be approved and commercialized for patients. By having access to the high throughput facility we can try to make things a little bit faster because high throughput allows us to test 1,000 compounds quickly. Ultimately our graduate specialization in medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy offers comprehensive training, modern instrumentation, and the mentorship and resources students need to excel. If you're excited about drug discovery and you're looking for a program that will challenge and support you every step of the way, we'd love to welcome you to Ohio State.