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Jean Chmielewski appointed distinguished professor

The Purdue Board of Trustees on June 30 approved the appointment of Chemistry Professor Jean Chmielewski as the Alice Watson Kramer Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. The professorship was named in honor of the first woman to receive a Ph.D in chemistry, in 1935. Designated professorships honor individuals whose achievements in scholarship or research have been internationally recognized or who have made a unique contribution to the university through scholarship, research, teaching or leadership functions. Purdue now has 111 designated professors, 24 of whom are in the College of Science. Prof. Chmielewski is the first woman on the Science faculty to be named a distinguished professor.

Prof. Chmielewski has been on the Purdue faculty since 1990. She was a National Institute of Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley from 1988-90 and at Rockefeller University in New York City in 1988.

In 1983 she received her bachelor’s degree from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Chmielewski earned her doctoral degree from Columbia University in 1988.

Her main area of research is in bio-organic chemistry and chemical biology, with a major focus on the disassembly of proteins involved in AIDS and cancer. Additionally, her research projects probe the molecular origins of life and the targeting of drugs to disease sites in the body.

Chmielewski received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator award in 1994. She was appointed an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 1996 and won the American Chemical Society Cope Scholar Award in 2003. She has been a University Faculty Scholar since 2000, when she also received the Arthur E. Kelly Award for Excellence in Teaching at Purdue.

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