Seth Herzon, PhD

Seth Herzon completed his undergraduate studies at Temple University, obtained a PhD in 2006 from Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Andrew G. Myers, and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow with Professor John F. Hartwig at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. He began at Yale in 2008 and is currently the Milton Harris ’29 Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry. He holds joint appointments in the Departments of Pharmacology and Therapeutic Radiology at the Yale School of Medicine and is a Member of the Yale Cancer Center. Herzon's research is centered on organic synthesis with an emphasis on the molecular mechanism of action and structure–function studies of anticancer and microbiome-derived secondary metabolites. In 2021 he co-founded the oncology company Modifi Biosciences, which was acquired by Merck and Company in the Fall of 2024. From 2018–2023 he served as an Associate Editor for The Journal of Organic Chemistry.

He has been recognized for his accomplishments by a number of awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Cottrell Scholar Award of the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement, a Research Scholar Award from the American Cancer Society, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society, the Novartis Chemistry Lectureship, the Synthesis/Synlett Award in Organic Chemistry, the Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator, the Thieme–IUPAC Award, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Organic Synthesis, the Wilson Prize, a Yale Faculty Innovation Award, a Creativity Extension Award from the National Science Foundation, and the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry. From 2018–2019 he was a member of the United States Defense Science Study Group, Sponsored by the Institute for Defense Analyses.