Douglas A. Mitchell

William Kelly Warren Sr. Chair in Biochemistry
Professor of Chemistry, Director of Vanderbilt Institute for Chemical Biology

Dr. Mitchell will be accepting graduate students for Fall 2025.

Mitchell joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015, then Professor in 2018. In 2025, the Mitchell group relocated to Vanderbilt University, where they continue to focus on the intersection of big data genomics, enzyme chemistry, and peptide engineering.

 

The Mitchell group has developed new tools to expedite the discovery of natural products from sequencing data, including molecules from bacteria that cannot be cultivated in a lab. In particular, the lab focuses on highly constrained, macrocyclic peptides that undergo extensive post-translational modification during their biosynthetic maturation. Using a genes-to-molecule approach, they have uncovered numerous structurally unique molecules and revealed unprecedented enzyme chemistry employed in their formation. This knowledge is then leveraged to produce new-to-nature compounds with improved or novel activities with the ultimate goal of unleashing the full biosynthetic potential of Nature to reshape the diagnosis and treatment of human disease.