Paul Hanson's Biography

Paul Hanson, Professor, University of Kansas

Paul R. Hanson obtained his B.A. in chemistry from Luther College in 1985 while carrying out undergraduate research for three years under the late Adrian Docken. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1993, under the mentorship of Professor Thomas R. Hoye, where he worked on the total synthesis and structural elucidation of members and analogs of the Annonaceous Acetogenin family of natural products. As an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Stanford (1993-1996), he worked on Pd-catalyzed cycloisomerization methods en route to vitamin D3 and analogs under the direction of Professor Barry M. Trost. His independent career as an Assistant Professor started in 1996 at the University of Kansas in the Department of Chemistry with a courtesy appointment in Medicinal Chemistry. He received the NSF Career Award in 1999 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and became a full professor in 2006. He is currently a project leader in the Center for Chemical Methodologies and Library Development (KU-CMLD, Jeffrey Aubé PI) at the University of Kansas and is a Principal Investigator on an NIH-funded training grant in Chemical Biology (2007-present). He is also serving as a standing member of the NIH Synthetic and Biological Chemistry B Study Section. The long-term goals of his program center on the development of novel synthetic methods in the areas of heterocyclic chemistry, the biological and synthetic utility of phosphorus- and sulfur-containing heterocycles, natural product chemistry, immobilized reagents, flow-through and high throughput chemistry for library synthesis.