Professor Samuel Danishefsky, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has received the 2018 Derek Barton Gold Medal form the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Dr. Danishefsky earned his B.S. in chemistry at Yeshiva University in 1956. He earned his PhD in organic chemistry under the direction of Peter Yates and subsequently carried out postdoctoral studies under the direction of Gilbert Stork. Prof. Danishefsky joined the department of chemistry at Pittsburgh University in 1963. In 1980 he moved to Yale University, where he was a professor of Chemistry until he moved to Columbia University and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1993. He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1986. He has been a recipient of numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize (1996), and the ACS Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry (2006).
Prof. Danishefsky’s research focuses on the total synthesis of complex natural products and carbohydrate antigens. He is also a pioneer in developing synthetic routes to fully synthetic glycoproteins.
