Justin Du Bois (b. 1969) earned his B.S. in chemistry from University of California at Berkeley in 1992.
Du Bois earned his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1997, and he was awarded the 1999 ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award in Graduate Chemistry. He then went on to complete a two-year postdoc in the lab of Stephen J. Lippard at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Stanford faculty.
At Stanford, Du Bois has created a research program that combines fundamental methodological studies with cutting-edge natural product synthesis. Among his first accomplishments have been the development of novel methods for the selective oxidation of saturated C-H bonds. More recently, Du Bois has found a simple way to selectively aziridinate alkenes.
His group has reported syntheses of manzacidins A and C, members of a class of natural products that inhibit serotonin receptors. Du Bois's methods for C-H bond functionalization allowed his group to synthesize the substituted tetrahydropyrimidine core of the manzacidins, which are no longer available from indigenous sources.
Du Bois's more recent asymmetric synthesis of tetrodotoxin, the guanidinium poison found in the Japanese fugu, or blowfish, has provided another showcase for his methods.
Already, Dr. Du Bois's scientific contributions have been recognized by numerous awards, including Camille & Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award as well as young investigator awards from the Beckman Foundation, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Arthur C. Cope Young Scholars Award (2004).