PROMINENT ALUMNI

Dr. Thomas C. Bruice,
Bio-Organic Chemistry Pioneer

A research professor of chemistry at UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Thomas C. Bruice has been one of the 50 most widely cited chemists in the world, which testifies to the significance and influence of his work.

A prodigious author, Dr. Bruice has published 553 research papers in a career spanning more than half a century. He has spent his life working at the frontier between chemistry and biology. His research has helped to create entire new fields, such as bio-organic chemistry, and made major contributions in dozens of other areas of study.

He has served on the faculty of Yale, Johns Hopkins and Cornell universities in addition to UCSB. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow; received the Repligen Medal, the highest award of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Biological Chemistry; and was the first recipient of the Alfred Bader Award, the highest honor in the field of bioorganic chemistry.

His research has helped lay the chemical foundation necessary for understanding basic biological processes. For example, it has helped us understand how vitamins work in our bodies, analyzed cancer causing agents and provided chemotherapy mechanisms. He has discovered models for modern drug design and found compounds that can enter a nucleus of a living cell to change its genes.