We are delighted to welcome Professor Mingji Dai (Emory University), Professor Joshua Pierce (North Carolina State University), Dr Alisson Walker (Vanderbilt University) and Professor Nadine Ziemert (University of Tübingen) to the Natural Product Reports team as Advisory Board members!
Dr Mingji Dai is currently the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry at Emory University. He grew up in a small village in Sichuan, China. He received his B.S. degree from Peking University, Ph.D. degree from Columbia University, and postdoctoral training at Harvard University and the Broad Institute. He began his independent career as an assistant professor at Purdue University and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2018 and full professor in 2020. He moved to Emory University in 2022. His lab focuses on developing new strategies and methodologies for the synthesis of complex natural products and other medicinally important molecules.
Professor Joshua Pierce is currently the Howard J. Schaeffer Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at North Carolina State University. Research in the Pierce group is focused on harnessing the diverse architectures of marine natural products to inspire advances in chemical reaction development, chemical biology and therapeutic lead identification.
Allison Walker is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with a joint appointment in the Departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences. Her research focuses on the development of machine learning and other computational tools for natural product discovery and biosynthesis. One ongoing project in the Walker lab is the development of methods to predict the activity of natural products from the sequence of the biosynthetic gene clusters that produce them. This methodology will enable more efficient genome mining for bioactive natural products.
Nadine is a Professor of Natural Product Genome Mining at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she leads a research group at the interface of computational and wet lab research to explore the diversity and evolution of bacterial natural products, with a focus on antibiotic discovery. Her team develops and maintains tools—including ARTS, BGC Atlas, and autoMLST—that support the prediction, classification, and comparative analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters. She is a member of the German Center for Infection Research and serves on the executive board of the CMFI Cluster of Excellence. Nadine is committed to open science and collaborative tool development to advance natural product discovery and tackle the global antibiotic resistance crisis.
Find some of their recent RSC publications below:
Antarctic bacterial natural products: from genomic insights to drug discovery
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2025, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/D4NP00045E
Advances, opportunities, and challenges in methods for interrogating the structure activity relationships of natural products
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2024, 41, 1543-1578, DOI: 10.1039/D4NP00009A
Pyrrolidine-2,3-diones: heterocyclic scaffolds that inhibit and eradicate S. aureus biofilms
Chem. Commun., 2024, 60, 11540-11543, DOI: 10.1039/D4CC02708F
Divergent synthesis of δ-valerolactones and furanones via palladium or copper-catalyzed α-hydroxycyclopropanol ring opening cyclizations
Chem. Commun., 2024, 60, 10112-10115, DOI: 10.1039/D4CC03255A
9-Step synthesis of (−)-larikaempferic acid methyl ester enabled by skeletal rearrangement
Chem. Commun., 2024, 60, 71647167, DOI: 10.1039/D4CC01462F
The confluence of big data and evolutionary genome mining for the discovery of natural products
Nat. Prod. Rep., 2021, 38, 2024-2040, DOI: 10.1039/D1NP00013F
