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Dr. Jakob Magolan
Associate Professor, Dept. of Biochemistry and Biomedical Science
Boris Family Chair of Drug Discovery
Associate Member, Dept. of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Member, Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research
Email: magolanj@mcmaster.ca
Tel: 905-525-9140 ext. 22268
Office: Room 2234, MDCL (Michael Degroote Center for Learning and Discovery)
Mail: 1200 Main Street West, MDCL 2306
Hamilton, ON, L8N 3Z5, Canada
About Dr. Magolan
Dr. Magolan was born in Poland and raised in Kitchener, Canada. He attended Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, where he earned undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and in Physical and Health Education. At Queen's, Jake also played volleyball and was fortunate to be a member of a great team that won two Ontario championships. Perhaps this experience helped him to appreciate the remarkable capacity of a friendly team of experts, both in sport and in science. As an undergraduate student, Jake worked with Prof. Robert Lemieux on the synthesis of new liquid crystals. He pursued graduate studies at Western University in London, Canada, under the mentorship of Prof. Michael Kerr, working on synthetic methodology development and the total synthesis of natural products. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2007, Jake moved to Brisbane, Australia, to pursue postdoctoral studies at the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery in Brisbane in the field of anti-pancreatic cancer medicinal chemistry under the guidance of Prof. Mark Coster. In 2010, Dr. Magolan began his independent academic career in the Chemistry Department at the University of Idaho where he established an NSF-funded research program in synthetic methodology and was the University's primary instructor of organic chemistry. In Idaho, Jake received recognition for his commitment to undergraduate research and education. In 2017, he presented a TEDx talk about organic chemistry to an audience that would ultimately prove to be much larger than that of his typical classes. Also in 2017, after obtaining Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor, he relocated his research program back home to Canada where, at McMaster University, he holds the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and is the inaugural Boris Family Endowed Chair of Drug Discovery.
At McMaster, the main goal of Dr. Magolan and his research team is to make important chemistry contributions to large interdisciplinary collaborative research programs in the challenging field of drug discovery and development across a range of therapeutic areas. In parallel, his laboratory is inspired by the continued need for fundamental organic chemistry discovery that results in the development of new tools and processes that improve the science of organic synthesis.