Professor William Pomerantz named Institute on the Environment Fellow

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (8/29/2024) – Professor William C. K. Pomerantz has been recently selected as a University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment (IonE) Fellow. IonE Fellows are established researchers and innovative thought leaders who have demonstrated excellence in disciplines related to environmental protection or sustainability, maintain a significant publication record regarding subjects of topical relevance to IonE, and have been recognized by national and international colleagues.

Pomerantz’s fellowship recognizes a new interest area in his research program that has been emerging over the last six years, for addressing a key societal challenge, namely the persistence of poly- and perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS). IonE provides access to a collaborative educational environment with researchers interested in problems surrounding sustainability and supports  interactions with external partners to help solve important societal problems, including but not limited to PFAS. Using his laboratory’s expertise in synthetic organofluorine chemistry, and expertise in quantitative 19F nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), Pomerantz has begun to work with researchers across campus and with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to help identify persistent fluorinated functional groups in widely-used pharmaceuticals and pesticides, to help quantify total PFAS in the environment, and to start designing PFAS alternatives for biomedical applications.

Through a collaboration with Bill Arnold in the UMN Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Pomerantz has served as a co-PI on several collaborative state and federally funded grants to support this research since 2018 from the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, the USGS, and the National Science Foundation. To continue to expand the impact of this important research, Pomerantz has also worked with the College of Science and Engineering leadership over the last year to engage a community of IonE researchers to help identify collaborative opportunities for pooling expertise across multiple disciplines. He says he looks forward to continuing this work as a member of the IonE.

Since joining the UMN faculty in 2012, Pomerantz’s chemistry research has focused on the development of chemical biology and medicinal chemistry approaches for modulating transcription factor function through disruption of protein-protein interactions, with a significant focus in the area of epigenetics. In addition to work in his lab, he is currently the co-director of the NIH T32 Chemistry Biology Interface Training Grant, which works to provide rigorous and interdisciplinary training to a diverse and inclusive community of biomedical scientists and Topic Editor for ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, an ACS Transformative Journal. Pomerantz’s impact on the chemistry community has been recognized with many honors, including the Horace T. Morse Award (2024), the George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Teaching (2022), the NIH Maximizing Investigators Research Award (2021), the McKnight Presidential Fellowship (2018), the Guillermo E. Borja Career Development Award (2018), being named a Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (2016), and the international Chemical Biology Society’s Rising Star Award (2016).