Wei Wang, PhD
Wei Wang earned his PhD degree in chemistry in 2000 from North Carolina State University. He then worked as a post-doc fellow with Prof. Victor J. Hruby at the University of Arizona Chemistry for ca. 2 years. He then worked as a PI in drug discovery in the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. He spent 15 years (August 2003-August 2018) as faculty in the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He is full professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, the director of drug discovery program in College of Pharmacy and the member of BIO5 institute and cancer center.
Cancer Focus
His research interest focuses on exploring chemical tools including chemical library synthesis and HTS, and functional chemical probes to modulate the cancer related biological targets and signaling pathways and optimize hit compounds to lead drug candidates for cancer clinical studies. The targets include kinases, and protein-protein and -DNA/RNA interactions and cancer immunotherapy. A particular strength of his research is the utilization of multidisciplinary approaches crossing chemical and biomedical fields to answer the specific biological questions through collaborative efforts.