About the Speaker

Bio

Prof. Andrew Lowell is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Tech. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Washington State University and earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in organic chemistry congruently in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied the total synthesis of purpuromycin under the guidance of Marisa C. Kozlowski. He also worked as a visiting scholar with Yoko Yamakoshi at Penn, working on the synthesis and testing of gadolinium chelators as MRI imaging agents and the synthesis of novel cavitands.

His research is focused on medicinally important new natural products and understanding the biosynthetic pathways responsible for their production, ultimately working to synthesize and derivatize complex natural products to create new and improved medicines. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan under the mentorship of David Sherman, Ph.D., where he studied biocatalytic methods toward macrolide antibiotics.