October 27, 2020 // Posted In Academics, Research
If you’re a sports fan, the best comparisons for Dr. John Wood coming to Baylor in 2013 might be a top free agent or recruit signing with your team. If fishing is your thing, he’s the “big fish” that didn’t get away.
In the academic world, no metaphor is needed — he’s a nationally recognized leader in cancer research, a top scholar and mentor who chose to bring his research operation to Baylor in 2013 and has been leading students in groundbreaking natural product synthesis research from the Baylor Sciences Building ever since.
Wood, the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, applies his discipline in the fight against cancer through a process known as natural product synthesis. Most major brand-name drugs are the result of natural products, such as plants, that have a quality or mechanism that fights disease. Wood and his students re-create these molecules and put them together in different ways to fight disease.