About Dr. Ian B. Seiple
Ian B. Seiple is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. His lab focuses on synthetic organic chemistry at the interface of drug discovery and human health.
📞 858-784-8035
✉️ iseiple@scripps.edu
Background
Ian earned his B.S. in Chemistry with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Professor Dirk Trauner. He went on to pursue his Ph.D. in Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute with Professor Phil S. Baran, completing total syntheses of complex natural products and pioneering new methods in radical chemistry.
Following his doctoral work, Ian joined Professor Andrew G. Myers’ laboratory at Harvard University as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, where he developed a convergent, modular platform for the synthesis of macrolide antibiotics. This research led to the formation of Macrolide Pharmaceuticals and opened new avenues for antibiotic design.
From 2015 to 2024, Ian was on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as an Associate Professor, where he established a research program that bridged chemical innovation with biomedical applications. In 2024, he returned to Scripps as a Professor of Chemistry.
Research Contributions
- Synthetic methodology: New asymmetric and radical-based routes to complex natural products.
- Antibiotics: Development of modular strategies to generate hundreds of macrolide analogues, tackling resistance and expanding spectra of activity.
- Chemical tools: New approaches such as photoactivatable crosslinkers and expansion microscopy anchors that enable unprecedented resolution in biological imaging.
Selected Honors & Awards
- Amgen Young Investigator Award (2021)
- Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2021)
- Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (2018)
- Beckman Young Investigator Award (2018)
- American Cancer Society Individual Research Award (2018)
- Catalyst Awards for Translational Research (2016, 2019)
- Thieme Chemistry Journals Award (2019)