Paul J. Hergenrother

Paul J. Hergenrother attended the University of Notre Dame, where he received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1994. From there Paul moved to the University of Texas at Austin, to conduct graduate research under the direction of Professor Stephen F. Martin. He graduated with his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1999 and moved on as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow to Harvard University, where he worked in the laboratory of Professor Stuart L. Schreiber in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Paul established his own laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and in 2013 was named the Kenneth L. Rinehart Endowed Chair in Natural Products Chemistry. The Hergenrother lab works on the discovery of new antibacterials where his group has developed predictive guidelines for compound accumulation in Gram-negative pathogens. Paul’s lab has also discovered anticancer compounds including ErSO, with potent activity against ER+ breast tumors. Professor Hergenrother led the team that developed a novel saliva-based assay for SARS-CoV-2, a simple protocol that bypasses the need for RNA isolation and as such is inexpensive, returns rapid results, and can be used on the scale. The University of Illinois administered over 1,000,000 of these tests on its campus during Fall 2020, typically testing ~10,000 people a day, and this test is now widely used throughout the state, country, and world.