Education:
- Ph.D. University of New Brunswick
- B.S. University of New Brunswick
Appointment(s):
- Associate Dean of the Graduate School
- Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry
- Research Associate Professor in the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Career Highlights:
Robert J. Doerksen was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and spent time growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, USA; Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada; and Cambridge, England, UK. He obtained a Double First Class Honours Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Physics from University of New Brunswick (UNB), a graduate level Diploma in Christian Studies from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and a PhD in Chemistry from UNB, under the guidance of Prof. Ajit Thakkar, specializing in computational physical chemistry. He proceeded to postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Martin Head-Gordon, and in the Department of Chemistry at University of Pennsylvania (Philadephia, PA, USA), with Prof. Michael Klein. Since 2004, he has been at the School of Pharmacy at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS, USA, first as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and currently as an associate professor of medicinal chemistry in the Department of BioMolecular Sciences. Doerksen also is a research associate professor in the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Mississippi. In 2017, he was appointed as Associate Dean of the Graduate School.
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Current Research
His research specialty is computational medicinal chemistry, which includes computational studies on the properties of small molecules and of proteins as well as of calculations on the interactions of proteins with small molecules or other proteins. His research has focused on protein kinases and on small molecules and protein targets of relevance to a variety of human diseases such as malaria, hepatitis B, ischemia, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.
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Dr. Doerksen’s list of publications can be found in his Google Scholar entry: