Wilfred A. van der Donk, Richard E. Heckert Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, has received the 2026 A. I. Scott Medal, awarded jointly by the Texas A&M Local Section of the American Chemical Society and the Texas A&M University Department of Chemistry.
The medal recognizes excellence in biological chemistry research and honors the legacy of A. Ian Scott, the Texas A&M chemist whose work illuminated the biosynthesis of vitamin B12.
Van der Donk will receive the gold medal at an award symposium at Texas A&M on October 30, where he will deliver a lecture titled “Mode of Action of the Lethal Enterococcal Cytolysin.” Stavroula Hatzios of Yale University and Michael Freeman of the University of Minnesota will also speak.
The lecture topic sits squarely in the territory that has made van der Donk one of the defining figures in peptide natural products. His group combines chemistry, enzymology, and molecular biology to understand how enzymes build ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides, then puts that knowledge to work in synthetic biology and the search for new antibiotics.
His laboratory helped establish the modern understanding of lanthipeptide biosynthesis, reconstituting the enzymatic machinery that installs thioether cross-links and showing that these enzymes can process substrates far removed from their natural ones. Genome mining in the group continues to uncover new classes of modified peptides, most recently the nitrilobacillins, which carry a post-translationally installed C-terminal nitrile, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society this year.
Van der Donk earned his B.S. at Leiden University and his Ph.D. at Rice University, completed postdoctoral work at MIT, and joined the Illinois faculty in 1997. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The American Peptide Society recognized his contributions with the 2017 Vincent du Vigneaud Award, and we are delighted to see his work honored once again. Congratulations, Wilfred!
