David Thompson's Biography

David Thompson, Professor, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University

Professor Thompson received Bachelor degrees in Chemistry and Biology from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. degree in Organic Chemistry from Colorado State University for his work with Louis S. Hegedus. After postdoctoral studies with James K. Hurst at the Oregon Health & Sciences University, he joined the Department of Chemical & Biological Sciences there as an Assistant Professor. He then moved to the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University where he has held the position of Professor since 2000 and a courtesy appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering since 2010. Prof. Thompson has served as Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, University of Florida, Japan Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Osaka University, Technical University of Denmark, and Chulalongkorn University. He has been recognized as a University Faculty Scholar, a Top Ten Outstanding Teacher in the College of Science at Purdue, and the Head of the Organic Chemistry Division for seven years. Prof. Thompson is the Director of the Purdue Specialized NCI Experimental Therapeutics – Chemical Biology Consortium program and has served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Langmuir (2000-2005) and Bioconjugate Chemistry (2004-2013), an Associate Editor of WIRES: Nanomedicine & Nanobiotechnology (2005-2016), an Alternate Counselor of the ACS Division of Colloid and Surface Science (2014-2017), and the Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Group in the Purdue University Center for Cancer Research (2017-2020).

Dr. Thompson has published over 160 papers and been awarded 9 patents in areas focused on the synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients by telescoped continuous manufacturing methods, development of bioresponsive self-assembling materials for gene and drug delivery, and accelerated protein structure determination using novel materials and sample preparation techniques.