Rate My Professor Amy Dounay

Dounay's research at Colorado College centers on the discovery of new medicines to treat African sleeping sickness (Trypanosoma brucei), employing drug design, synthesis, computational modeling, and biological evaluation through international collaborations. She also leads efforts in Distributed Drug Discovery for antibiotics via combinatorial synthesis and greener pedagogical protocols in organic chemistry laboratories worldwide. Her program has engaged numerous undergraduate students in pharmaceutical industry-style research, including projects on resistant bacteria like Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Funding includes the Boettcher Foundation Webb-Waring Early Career Investigator Biomedical Research Award (2014–2017), Research Corporation for Science Advancement Cottrell College Science Award (2014–2016), and a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant. Key publications encompass total syntheses such as 'Total Synthesis of the Marine Natural Product 7-Deoxy-Okadaic Acid' (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 1999), the review 'The Asymmetric Intramolecular Heck Reaction in Natural Product Total Synthesis' (Chem. Rev., 2003), Pfizer-era work on dual norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors and 5-HT1A agonists (Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett., 2009–2011), and recent contributions like 'Novel 1,2-dihydroquinazolin-2-ones... against Trypanosoma brucei' (Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett., 2017) and 'Globally Distributed Drug Discovery of New Antibiotics' (J. Chem. Educ., 2019). She teaches courses in organic and medicinal chemistry and has delivered invited seminars and presentations at conferences such as the Gordon Research Conference on Medicinal Chemistry.