Dr. Damian W. Young

Damian W. Young, Ph.D. is the Robert A. Welch Chair in Science and Associate Director of the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor College of Medicine. He additionally holds faculty appointments as Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and the Department of Pathology and Immunology. He also holds and Adjunct position with the Department of Chemistry at Rice University. Dr. Young’s research is focused on applying principles of modern synthetic organic chemistry to constructing collections of biologically active small molecules for drug discovery. He has applied concepts related to generating molecular diversity within groups of small molecules for modulating a variety of disease-associated biological targets. This has led to the development of chemical probes for interrogating biology and clinical leads for therapeutics. His lab was among the first to apply the principles of diversity generation to fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) and DNA-Encoded Library (DEL) platforms.  

Dr. Young received a B.S. in chemistry from Howard University and then worked as a process chemist at Trimeris Inc. on the HIV drug enfuvirtide. He received a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry under the direction of Prof. Daniel Comins at North Carolina State University and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies in the lab of Prof. Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to joining Baylor, he was Group Leader within the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Project Leader for the Harvard/Broad Centers of Excellence in Methodology and Library Development (CMLD).

Affiliation:

Damian W. Young
Robert A. Welch Chair in Science

Associate Director, Center for Drug Discovery (CDD)

Investigator, Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute
Associate Professor, Pharmacology and Chemical Biology

Associate Professor, Pathology and Immunology

Associate Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Adjunct Associate Professor of Chemistry, Rice University