Michael Jung

Michael Jung received his BA in 1969 from Rice University and his PhD in 1973 from Columbia University, where he worked with Gilbert Stork as an NSF Fellow. After a one-year NATO postdoctoral fellowship with Albert Eschenmoser at the ETH in Zurich, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 1974, where he is now the Walter and Shirley Wong Chair in Medicinal Drug Discovery. Since 2001, he has been a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. He currently consults for several industrial laboratories in both biotech and big pharma settings. He is an authority on synthetic organic and medicinal chemistry and has more than 420 patents and/or applications arising from both his consulting activities and his own research. Recently he has expanded his role in medicinal chemistry at UCLA and has more than 12 ongoing collaborations. Two compounds from his lab have been approved and are on the market: 1) enzalutamide (Xtandi), approved 8/31/12 for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), and 2) apalutamide (Erleada), approved 2/14/18 for the treatment of non-metastatic CRPC. At present he has four drugs in clinical trials for cancer, Crohn’s disease and hair growth. He has co-founded 12 biotech startups with eight still operational. Since 2016, he has served as the Associate Dean for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Division of Physical Sciences at UCLA. He has supervised 94 PhD and 9 masters theses and has taught 135 postdoctoral scholars. He has published more than 370 articles and given over 670 lectures on his research.