Research Directory

Dr. Joe Barchi
Structural Glycoconjugate Chemistry and NMR

Dr. Barchi received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Hawaii with Richard E. Moore and did 2 years of postdoctoral work at Duke University with Bert Fraser-Reid. He then joined the NCI as a staff fellow in 1988, was promoted to staff scientist and then to senior scientist in 2002. His main research interests are in synthetic medicinal chemistry as it relates to carbohydrate-based drug design, and the high-resolution structural analysis of sugars, glycopeptides and small molecule drug candidates by NMR spectroscopy.

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Dr. Terry Burke
Bioorganic Chemistry

Dr. Burke received his B.S., summa cum laude, in Chemistry from St. Martin's College, followed by his Ph.D. degree in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Washington under the direction of Professor Wendel Nelson. He then studied as a Fellow of the Pharmacology Associate Research Training Program in the Laboratory of Dr. Lance Pohl, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and subsequently under the direction of Dr. Kenner Rice as a Senior Staff Fellow of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases. He briefly left the NIH to serve as Principal Chemist of Peptide Technologies Corporation before returning in 1989 as a tenured Principal Investigator in the Chemical Biology Laboratory (previously, the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry). In 2002 he became Head of the Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Section and in 2003 he was appointed a member of the Senior Biomedical Research Service (SBRS).

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Dr. Jeff Gildersleeve
Chemical Glycobiology

Jeff Gildersleeve obtained his B.S. degree in biology in 1993 from the University of California at San Diego. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University under the guidance of Professor Dan Kahne, where he studied mechanistic organic chemistry, carbohydrate synthesis, and chemical biology. He completed postdoctoral training with Professor Peter Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute. His work focused on directed evolution of protein catalysts and the development of high-throughput screens for catalytic antibodies. In the summer of 2003, he joined the NCI as a Principal Investigator in the Chemical Biology Laboratory (formerly the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry). His research focuses on the development of carbohydrate microarrays and the application of this technology to cancer vaccine and biomarker research.

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Dr. Larry Keefer
Drug Design

Dr. Keefer received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of New Hampshire in 1966 and held research positions at the Chicago Medical School and the University of Nebraska College of Medicine before joining the NCI staff in 1971.

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Dr. Jim Kelley
Analytical Chemistry

Dr. Kelley received his B.S. in Chemistry from Wabash College followed by his Ph.D. in Analytical Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Klaus Biemann, with whom he developed some of the first methodology for sequencing peptides by mass spectrometry. He joined NIH in 1976 as a member of the Drug Design and Chemistry Section, a precursor organization of the current Chemical Biology Laboratory.

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Dr. Jordan L. Meier
Molecular Recognition

Dr. Meier received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Creighton University in 2004, getting introduced to research as an NSF REU student. After graduation he moved to the University of California – San Diego, performing graduate research in natural products biochemistry and proteomics under the mentorship of Prof. Michael D. Burkart. After receiving his PhD in chemistry in 2009, he moved to the California Institute of Technology. His research as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Peter B. Dervan focused on the development of high-throughput sequencing methods to analyze small molecule-DNA interactions. Dr. Meier then moved east to join the NCI in 2013. Here, in the CBL, his research focuses on synthetic molecular approaches to study and modulate cofactor-mediated signaling pathways at the interface of cancer cell metabolism and gene expression.

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Dr. Marc Nicklaus
Computer-Aided Drug Design

Dr. Nicklaus received his Ph.D. in applied physics from the Eberhards-Karls-Universitat, Tubingen, Germany, and then served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Molecular Modeling Section of the then called Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry, NCI. He became a staff fellow in 1998, and a Senior Scientist in 2002. He has been heading the newly founded Computer-Aided Drug Design Group since 2000.

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Dr. John 'Jay' Schneekloth
Chemical Genetics

Dr. Schneekloth received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 2001, where he wrote his honors thesis with Prof. Gordon Gribble. He then moved to Yale University and obtained a Ph.D. from the chemistry department with Prof. Craig Crews in 2006. As a graduate student he studied natural product total synthesis and chemical biology relating to the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. He then pursued an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Erik Sorensen at Princeton University, where he worked on the development of a new multicomponent reaction and the application of this reaction to the synthesis of analgesic natural products. He returned to Yale in 2009 where he worked as a medicinal chemist at the Yale Small Molecule Discovery Center. In 2011, Dr. Schneekloth joined NCI where his research involves using synthetic chemistry and screening techniques to develop small molecule probes of signal transduction pathways. Specific areas of interest include the identification of small molecule inhibitors of ubiquitin-like signaling pathways and the study of oligomeric small molecules that disrupt protein-protein interactions relevant to cancer, HIV and Alzheimer's disease.

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Dr. Joel Schneider
Peptide Design and Materials

Dr. Schneider received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Texas A&M University with Jeffery Kelly and then went on to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics where he was a George W. Raiziss Fellow with William DeGrado studying protein design. In 1999, he began his independent career at the University of Delaware as an assistant professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and was promoted to associate and then full professor in 2009 with a secondary appointment in Materials Science and Engineering. In 2010, he joined the NCI as Laboratory Chief of the Chemical Biology Laboratory. He also currently serves as Editor in Chief of Biopolymers-Peptide Science, the journal of the American Peptide Society.

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Dr. Martin Schnermann
Natural Products Chemistry

Dr. Schnermann attended Colby College and graduated in 2002 with degrees in Chemistry (honors with Prof. Dasan Thamattoor) and Physics. After a year at Pfizer Research and Development (Groton, CT) as an associate in medicinal chemistry, he moved to the Scripps Research Institute. During his graduate studies, he performed research on the total synthesis and biological evaluation of anticancer natural products with Prof. Dale Boger and obtained a Ph.D. in 2008. He then pursued an NIH-postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Larry Overman at the University of California, Irvine. In 2012, Dr. Schnermann joined the NCI where his research focuses on the development of new organic methods and the application of organic synthesis to uncovering the mechanisms of action of bioactive natural products.

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Dr. Craig Thomas
Chemistry Technology

Craig Thomas received his BS from the University of Indianapolis in 1995 and received an MS degree and Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2000. He then undertook post-doctoral work in the laboratories of Dr. Sidney Hecht at the University of Virginia where he earned a fellowship through the American Cancer Society. From there, he moved the NIH where he directed the chemical biology core of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. In 2007, he moved to the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (currently the NIH Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, NCATS) where he serves as the group leader of chemistry technologies.

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