Paul Anthony Wender is an American chemist whose work is focused on organic chemistry, organometallic chemistry, synthesis, catalysis, chemical biology, imaging, drug delivery, and molecular therapeutics. He is currently the Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and is an Elected Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Wender Group addresses unsolved problems in chemistry, synthesis, biology, medicine, and materials science using new computational tools, new reactions, reagents, strategies and design. Leveraging affiliations with the Medical School, Imaging Center, Chemical Biology Program and Molecular Therapeutics Program as well as numerous internal and external collaborations, the lab emphasizes the use of chemistry, design and synthesis to address problems of significance in biology and medicine, including eradication of HIV/AIDS, overcoming resistant cancer, cancer immunotherapy and treating cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Paul Wender received his B.S. degree from Wilkes University and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. He served on the faculty at Harvard University and joined the faculty at Stanford University where he is the Francis W. Bergstrom Professor of Chemistry and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology. Professor Wender’s research has been recognized with numerous awards including recently the Tetrahedron Prize, Prelog Medal (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Arthur Cope Award (American Chemical Society), Cohen Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry (Israel Chemical Society), and Research Award of the German Bioactives and Biotechnology Leibniz Allaince. He has also been recognized with several teaching awards including the Hoagland Prize, Bing Teaching Award, and the Dean’s Teaching Award. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.