IUPAC has appointed Professor Ganesan the new editor of the scientific journal Pure and Applied Chemistry.
Ganesan is currently Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. Succeeding to the current editor Professor Hugh Burrows, Ganesan new interim position will start on 1 January 2023 and be for two years. During that time, IUPAC also intends to conduct a strategic review of the journal.
Ganesan was born and raised in Malaysia. Of Indian descent, he is named after the half-man, half-elephant Hindu God, Ganesha, and like many Tamils has one name only. He first became interested in chemistry by reading his elder brother’s textbooks and continued with this passion at the nearest university – the National University of Singapore (NUS), although attending classes involved crossing an international border. He then completed his Ph.D. in organic synthesis at the University of California-Berkeley under the supervision of Professor Clayton H. Heathcock, followed by postdoctoral studies in DNA at Harvard University with Professor Gregory L. Verdine. He began his independent career by returning to Singapore to work at the Centre for Natural Product Research and later as Principal Investigator of the Medicinal and Combinatorial Chemistry group at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB). In 1999, he moved to the UK to take up a position as Reader at the University of Southampton and, in 2010, to his current position as Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of East Anglia.
Over the years, Ganesan’s research has focused on combinatorial chemistry, synthetic methodology, the isolation and total synthesis of natural products, medicinal chemistry, and epigenetics. He co-founded the drug discovery company, Karus Therapeutics, that advanced two candidates to oncology clinical trials. He has chaired a Gordon Research, Conference, a Royal Society Scientific Meeting, and two EU COST Actions – Epigenetics: From Bench to Bedside, and Epigenetic Chemical Biology. He is a member of the IUPAC Division VII Subcommittee for Drug Discovery and Development and the RSC Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the ACS Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and as an editor for PLOS ONE, Marine Drugs and Current Chemical Biology.