The Chemistry Department consists of twenty full time faculty, nine adjunct faculty, two postdoctoral fellows, and nine full-time support staff. Information about our faculty and staff can be found by following the links on the left of this page.
2011 New faculty member, Dr. Kevin Minbiole:
Kevin P. C. Minbiole began his appointment in the Villanova University chemistry department in August 2011. He earned a B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Notre Dame in 1996, working with Paul Helquist. He then moved on to earn his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 2001 from the University of Pennsylvania in the research group of Amos Smith, III, completing the total synthesis of phorboxazole A. Following this was a two-year postdoctoral stint at Harvard University under Andy Myers, funded by the American Cancer Society. From 2003-2011, KPCM developed a natural products-themed undergraduate research group at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA (with the exception of Fall 2006, spent as a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The JMU research group developed novel tools for heterocycle synthesis, identified key antifungal metabolites from amphibians’ skin bacteria, and prepared new antibacterials with a double-headed amphiphilic structure. Kevin, his wife Emily, and their three young sons are excited to reconnect with family and friends in the Philadelphia area.
2012 New faculty member, Dr. Daniel A. Kraut
Dan Kraut began his appointment in the Villanova University chemistry department in January 2012. He earned a B.A. in biochemistry from Swarthmore College in 2000, working with Judith Voet on the irreversible inactivation of acetylcholinesterase. He then earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2006 from Stanford University in the research group of Dan Herschlag, where he studied the contributions of electrostatic and geometrical transition-state complementarity to enzyme catalysis, using the enzyme ketosteroid isomerase as a model system. He then went to Northwestern University for a post-doc in Andreas Matouschek's lab, where he was an American Cancer Society Fellow. There he began to study the mechanism of the proteasome, a macromolecular machine that unfolds and degrades cellular proteins in eukaryotes, work that he will continue at Villanova. Dan is excited to be back in the Philadelphia area, and to be teaching and doing research at Villanova.
