Dennis A. Dougherty

Dennis A. Dougherty (born December 4, 1952, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) is the George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. His research applies physical organic chemistry to systems of biological importance. Dougherty uses various approaches to understand of the human brain, including in vivo nonsense suppression, which incorporates unnatural amino acids into ion channels for structure-function studies.

Education Dougherty received his B.S. and M.S. in 1974 from Bucknell University. Subsequently, he earned his Ph.D. in 1978 under the supervision of Kurt Mislow at Princeton University and was a post-doctoral scholar in Jerome Berson's lab at Yale University in 1979.

Career In 1979 Dougherty became a member of the Caltech faculty, earning tenure in 1985. He pioneered the investigation of the role of cation–π interactions in protein structure, molecular recognition and enzyme catalysis. He is the scientific co-founder of Neurion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. In 2005 he published a textbook entitled Modern Physical Organic Chemistry with co-author Eric V. Anslyn.

Dougherty is the recipient of multiple teaching awards including the Richard Badger Teaching Award (1992), the ASCIT Excellence in Teaching Award (1987 and 2000), and the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2010). In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Selected publications

Awards

Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar (1984–1989) AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (1991) Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1992) Javits Neuroscience Investigator, NIH (2004) ACS James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry (2008) Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2010) Arthur C. Cope Award (2020)

Professional memberships

Phi Beta Kappa American Chemical Society American Association for the Advancement of Science Biophysical Society Society for Neuroscience National Academy of Sciences (2009) Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1994) Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999)

Personal life He currently lives in South Pasadena with his wife Dr. Ellen Dougherty, the superintendent of the Lawndale Elementary School District.