Given David Lawrence’s educational background—a bachelor’s degree in biology and a PhD in chemistry—it only seems natural that his research would encompass both disciplines.

David Lawrence, PhD

Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products

Research Interests

Inhibitors and drug development; enzyme sensors; light-activated inhibitors, sensors, and signaling proteins; light-induced gene expression; chemical genomics

Getting others to see it that way, however, wasn’t always easy.

“One of the people on my thesis committee thought I was nuts,” Lawrence says. “I had mentioned to him that I wanted to take the biology background that I had as an undergraduate, couple it with my synthesis background as a graduate student and do something that would interface between chemistry and biology. His response was, ‘Well, time will tell whether it’s a good idea or not.’ But you could tell that he was just really not convinced.”

Two-and-a-half decades later, time has told: Lawrence is a leading expert in the field of chemical biology, and he has found like-minded colleagues, first at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, and more recently in Chapel Hill. In the summer of 2007, he joined the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products at the UNC School of Pharmacy, the Department of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine, and the Lineberger Cancer Center. Just as Lawrence’s work spans several areas of research, UNC’s effort to recruit him was a joint venture involving all of these programs.

Lawrence says the opportunity to work with researchers from each of these areas was an important factor in his decision to come to Chapel Hill.

“The medicinal chemistry program is really uniquely positioned to interface between the chemistry department and the medical school on campus,” he says. “It serves as an intellectual bridge between the more chemical world and the more biological world.

“There are universities out there that have great chemistry departments and there are those that have great medical schools. There are even a handful that have both. But there are very few, like UNC, that also have an existing school of pharmacy, and in particular an existing medicinal chemistry program, which can serve as that bridge. In that sense, Carolina is quite unique. That’s one thing I found really appealing.”

Click on the links below to read about David Lawrence's work.