Jonathan Sessler

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Professor Jonathan L. Sessler was born in Urbana, Illinois, USA on May 20, 1956. He received a B.S. degree (with highest honors) in chemistry in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University in 1982 (supervisor: Professor James P. Collman). He was a NSF-CNRS and NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Jean-Marie Lehn at L'Universit� Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg, France. He was then a JSPS Visiting Scientist in Professor Tabushi's group in Kyoto, Japan. In September 1984 he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently the Roland K. Pettit Professor. Dr. Sessler has authored or coauthored over 425 research publications, written two books (with Dr. Steven J. Weghorn and Drs. Philip A. Gale and Won-Seob Cho, respectively), edited another book (with Drs. Susan Doctrow, Tom McMurry, and Stephen J. Lippard), and been an inventor of record on more than 70 issued U.S. Patents. Dr. Sessler is also a co-founder (with Dr. Richard A. Miller) of Pharmacyclics, Inc., a publicly traded company (pcyc; NASDQ) dedicated to developing biomedical applications of expanded porphyrins. In conjunction with Dr. Martin R. Johnson, Dr. Sessler has recently co-founded a second company, Anionics, Inc., that is targeting various commercial opportunities of anion recognition chemistry. Dr. Sessler has served as the co-organizer of several international conferences in porphyrin and macrocyclic chemistry and numerous ACS symposia. In addition to English, he speaks French, German, Spanish, and Hebrew and can get by in Japanese and Italian. He is the Editor of Supramolecular Chemistry, an Associate Editor for ChemComm, a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of J. Org. Chem. and J. Incl. Phenom., serves as the US National Representative for the Society of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines, and is a member of the International Committee for the International Symposium on Supramolecular and Macrocyclic Chemistry. He is also a standing member of the Synthetic Biological Chemistry A (SBCA) NIH Study Section. His current H-index is 63.