David Kingston Email & Phone Number

David Kingston received his Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University in 1964. He is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery. He has worked extensively on the chemistry and microtubule binding of paclitaxel and the epothilones, and he has carried out drug discovery work in both Suriname and Madagascar. In these countries he joined with conservation, industrial, and botanical groups to develop a model program for drug discovery and biodiversity conservation which ran for over 20 years, and led to the isolation and structure elucidation of hundreds of compounds. He is currently collaborating with CytImmune Sciences Inc. on targeting paclitaxel to tumors using gold nanoparticles, and he is also investigating the discovery and mechanism of action of antimalarial agents from the former Merck collection of natural product extracts. He is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Natural Products, a recipient of the Research Achievement Award of the American Society of Pharmacognosy and of the ACS Guenther Award for Natural Products, and he has served as a member of the NIH National Advisory Council for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and also serves as one of several lay pastors in his local church, the Blacksburg Christian Fellowship.

Listed skills include Chemistry, Science, Nmr, Organic Synthesis, and 7 others.