Jared Anderson awarded Predoctoral Fellowship from ACS MEDI

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (04/08/2022)—Jared Anderson, a 3rd-year chemistry graduate student working with Professor Daniel Harki, has received a 2022-2023 Predoctoral Fellowship from the American Chemical Society, Division of Medicinal Chemistry.

This prestigious award includes a $35,000 stipend and will give Anderson the opportunity to present his research at the 2022 Medicinal Chemistry Gordon Research Conference and the Fall 2022 ACS National Meeting in Chicago.

The program is open to predoctoral students in their third or fourth year of graduate study engaged in medicinal chemistry research in a Medicinal Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Biochemistry, or Chemistry department. Only four awards were made this year.

“The Medicinal Chemistry Division of the ACS recognizes outstanding graduate students with these 1-year fellowships,” says advisor Harki. “These national awards are very competitive, so I think it’s a great recognition of Jared’s hard work and research accomplishments.”

Anderson received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Colorado - Boulder. He then spent a year at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO studying recyclable polymers. While he found polymer science interesting, medicinal chemistry has long been his passion.

As part of the Harki group, Anderson is currently researching the promising therapeutic target NF-κB inducing kinase (NIK) for potential treatment of multiple myeloma. He is taking two approaches to drugging NIK: allosteric inhibition and targeted protein degradation.