Dr. John L. Wood given BU’s highest faculty honor as University Distinguished Professor

In 2023, Baylor introduced a new high honor for faculty — the title of “University Distinguished Professor,” an accolade to be given out only once or twice every two years, and even then only after an extensive review process. The honor recognizes faculty members for outstanding achievement in scholarship and/or creative activity, national and international recognition in their discipline, and mentorship of colleagues and students.

Earlier this month, Dr. John L. Wood, Baylor’s Robert A. Welch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, became the second BU professor to receive this high honor. Wood joined Dr. Mikeal Parsons as Baylor’s second University Distinguished Professor, recognized for his groundbreaking research using natural products.

“I am deeply honored to be named as a University Distinguished Professor at Baylor,” Wood says. “This honor, based upon my career, is one that I share with my wife, Jill, and three sons, as well as the extraordinarily talented undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students with whom I have had the privilege to work alongside for the past 32 years. The love, dedication and creativity of this talented group, coupled with the unwavering support and commitment from my faculty colleagues and Baylor’s administration, are at the heart of our achievements.”

Wood came to Baylor in 2013 after two decades on the faculties at Yale and Colorado State, his appointment at Baylor made possible in part by a $4.2 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Alongside Dr. Daniel Romo, Wood leads the Baylor Synthesis and Drug-Lead Discovery Laboratory, which focuses on the development and application of chemo- and site-selective methods for the derivatization of biologically and pharmacologically important natural products and other bioactive small molecules — work that plays a fundamental role in drug discovery.

For his work, Wood has been named a Baylor Outstanding Faculty Scholar (2019), a Fellow in the Royal Society of Chemistry, and recipient of the American Chemical Society’s Ernest Guenther Award — an honor that added the Baylor professor to a list of recipients that includes five Nobel Prize laureates.

Sic ’em, Dr. Wood!