Meet Dirk
Dirk Trauner, PhD, is a Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor of Chemistry and Pharmacology and a key collaborator in the design and synthesis of NCE analogs derived from Nr4a1 activators CsnB. His contributions span synthetic chemistry, structure–activity relationship (SAR) studies, and optimization across metabolism, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics. The Trauner group has synthesized more than 120 natural products, including polyketides, many of which are more complex than the compounds proposed for this work.
My Story
Dr. Trauner joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he advanced to Associate Professor with tenure and became a member of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2008, he moved to the University of Munich as a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Genetics. He returned to the United States in 2017 as the Janice Cutler Chair in Chemistry at New York University (Department of Chemistry). He sits on the editorial board of Organic Syntheses and the editorial advisory boards of ACS Central Science, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, Cell Chemical Biology, and Chem. His students have taken positions at many leading pharmaceutical companies and universities.