Craig A. Townsend is the Alsoph H. Corwin Professor of Chemistry and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biology and Biophysics. He received his B.A. with Honors in chemistry from Williams College and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale University, where he was an NIH Predoctoral Fellow and won the Richard L. Wolfgang Prize. He was then an International Exchange Postdoctoral Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the ETH in Zurich, and joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1976. His research interests are in the chemistry of natural products and the interface of organic chemistry, biology and medicine: stereochemical and mechanistic studies of principal biosynthetic enzymes and their engineering/directed evolution for synthetic ends; chemoenzymatic synthesis; enzymology and molecular biology of polyketides and beta-lactam antibiotics; drug design and clinical applications against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, tuberculosis and malaria.
Craig A. Townsend is the Alsoph H. Corwin Professor of Chemistry and holds joint appointments in the Departments of Biology and Biophysics. He received his B.A. with Honors in chemistry from Williams College and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale University, where he was an NIH Predoctoral Fellow and won the Richard L. Wolfgang Prize. He was then an International Exchange Postdoctoral Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the ETH in Zurich, and joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 1976. His research interests are in the chemistry of natural products and the interface of organic chemistry, biology and medicine: stereochemical and mechanistic studies of principal biosynthetic enzymes and their engineering/directed evolution for synthetic ends; chemoenzymatic synthesis; enzymology and molecular biology of polyketides and beta-lactam antibiotics; drug design and clinical applications against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, tuberculosis and malaria.