Adesis is pleased to announce the establishment of its Scientific Advisory Board, SAB, and to announce its first two charter members, Professors Amos B. Smith III of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and Martin F. Semmelhack of the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University.

_______________________________________________________

Amos B. Smith, III, a native of Lewisburg, PA, received Bucknell University's first combined four-year B.S.-M.S. degree in Chemistry. After a year in medical school (University of Pennsylvania), he earned his Ph.D. degree (1972) and completed a year as a Research Associate at Rockefeller University in the laboratories of William Agosta. In 1973, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the Rhodes-Thompson Professor of Chemistry. Prof. Smith is also a Member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, the Associate Director of the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery (PCMD), and from 1976-2000, a Member of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM). In 2001, he was appointed as an Honorary Member at the Kitasato Institute, where he serves as Visiting Director. From 1988 to 1996 he served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Penn. In 1998 he became the first Editor-in-Chief of the new American Chemical Society journal, Organic Letters.

Smith's research interests encompass three diverse areas: natural product synthesis, bioorganic chemistry, and materials science. To date more than 95 architecturally complex natural products have been prepared in his laboratory. Smith has achieved the design and synthesis of non-peptide peptidomimetics of neuropeptideic hormone/transmitters and protease enzyme inhibitors, and haptens for the production of catalytic antibodies capable of peptide bond formation. At Monell he pioneered the use of computerized pattern recognition techniques for the analysis of primate chemical communication. Collaborative programs in the area of materials science include the chemistry and physics of novel liquid crystals and the fullerenes.

Smith has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia (US), Cambridge (UK), Auckland (NZ) and Melbourne (Aust.) Universities, has served on the editorial boards for various chemistry journals and has been the recipient of numerous scientific awards, including the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the NIH Career Development Award, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, the Philadelphia Section Award of the ACS, The Kitasato Institute Medal (Japan), the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the ACS Ernest Guenther Award, the ACS Award for Creativity in Organic Chemistry, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Centenary Medal, Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), the Yamada-Koga Prize (Japan), Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (Japan), Fellow, American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of Chemistry Simonsen Medal (UK), Inaugural Fellow of the American Chemical Society, and DSc (honoris causa), Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Martin Semmelhack attended the University of Wisconsin where he obtained his B.S. in Chemistry degree. He was first introduced to organic chemistry research through an undergraduate project in organic photochemistry under Professor Howard Zimmerman. In 1963 he began doctoral research with Professor E. J. Corey at Harvard University in the then-new field of organo-transition metal reagents applied to organic synthesis. He left Harvard in spring, 1967, for a postdoctoral position as NIH fellow with Professor William S. Johnson at Stanford University. He then developed new methods of organic synthesis involving activation by transition metal coordination during his early work at Cornell University, and he then moved to Princeton University in 1978 as Professor of Chemistry.

His interests involve organic synthesis, with the current focus being the discovery of new bacterial signaling molecules, as well as the design and synthesis of antagonists of the signals as a new approach to bacterial control. With a leave from Princeton in 1987, he served as acting Department Head in medicinal chemistry for the American Cyanamid Medical Research Division (Lederle Laboratories) and continued through 1988 as a consulting director. From that incubation, one of the Lederle compounds, calicheamicin, and the related enediyne natural products became a research interest focused on designing and synthesizing simple systems that would show the chemically-triggerable cytotoxicity of the natural products.

Professor Semmelhack has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Grantee. He has served on editorial or advisory boards for the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organic Syntheses, Metals in Synthesis, Organometallics, Organic Reactions, and Comprehensive Organic Synthesis. He is currently Associate Chair for the Department of Chemistry at Princeton.