Newsletter

June 4, 2023

Dear DBC members, colleagues and friends:

I write to you midway through my year (!) of the Chair of the Division of Biological Chemistry.  Just because this comes so late in the year, doesn’t mean we haven’t been super busy, as I’m sure you’re aware from the email blasts you’ve gotten…!  We’ve made major changes to our governing bylaws and we’ve initiated a process to change the name of our division to “Biochemistry and Chemical Biology.”  Both changes were overwhelmingly endorsed by you, our members!  We hope to have this finalized by 2025 (yes, ACS moves this slowly…).

We’ve also formed and charged two new standing DBC committees, made up of division members in addition to elected officers.  One is the Communications Committee, co-chaired by Jen Heemstra, our Chair-Elect and Prof. Xiaoyu Shi from UC Irvine. A new and engaging Newsletter is in the works, so please check back!!!  A new website is also in the works, and our social media presence has seen a huge uptick!  The other new committee is the Awards Committee, chaired by me, with significant help from our Advisory Committee and at present, two DBC members at large.  We submitted four ACS Fellows nominations this year (!) and look forward to creating several other awards programs that recognize earlier career members of our division.  Stay tuned!

Finally, I’m so pleased to report that Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), the sponsor of our inaugural 2023 BMS Award in Enzyme Chemistry, which recognized Prof. Craig Crews of Yale University, has agreed in principle to fund this award annually!  This is terrific news, and the BMS award now joins the Abeles and Jencks Award for the Chemistry of Biological Processes and the Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry as major DBC awards.

More soon!

David Giedroc
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN