2016 Conference

James R. Eizner Family Endowed Chair in Chemistry

Director, School of Chemical Sciences

University of Illinois

Urbana, IL, USA

Faculty Website

Research Website

Research Interests, History, and Awards

Jonathan Sweedler’s research interests are two-fold. The first involves the creation of new approaches for assaying small volume samples, and the second is to apply these methods to study novel interactions between cells. The approaches he is involved in include micro and nanofluidics, miniaturized separations, mass spectrometry and NMR. He has created a range of mass spectrometry approaches to characterize the neurotransmitters and neuromodulators in individual neurons. He has used these tools to characterize small molecules and peptides in a range of animal models across the animal kingdom, and in samples as small as individual cells and cellular domains. Sweedler, with large international teams of biologists and technologists, has performed comprehensive interrogation of the genome, transcriptome and peptidome in comb jellies, sea snails, sea urchins and a range of mammals to uncover signaling peptides and pathways involved in wide range of functions and behaviors.

Jonathan Sweedler grew up in Livermore California, and attended UC Davis, graduating in 1983. He performed undergraduate research with Gerd Lamar studying the imidazole-iron bond in iron porphyrin systems using high field NMR, and also spent three summers with Tomas Hirschfeld at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory creating new approaches for on-line liquid chromatography infrared spectroscopy. He then worked with Bonner Denton in the Department of Chemistry from the University of Arizona in 1988 where he received his Ph.D. in 1988. After this, he spent several years at Stanford working on a collaborative project between Richard Zare in Chemistry and Richard Scheller in Neuroscience. He moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 where he has been ever since. At Illinois, he is currently the James R. Eiszner Family Endowed Professor of Chemistry, Director of the School of Chemical Science, and affiliated with the Neuroscience program and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Sweedler has published more than 350 manuscripts and presented 400 invited lectures. He has received numerous awards including the American Chemical Society (ACS) Analytical Division Arthur Findeis Award, the Benedetti-Pichler Award in Microanalysis, the Gill Prize in Neuroscience, the Instrumentation Award from the Analytical Division of the ACS, the Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award, and the ACS Award in Analytical Chemistry. He is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief for Analytical Chemistry.

Professor Sweedler's honors and awards include:

• • ANACHEM Award, Federation of Analytical and Spectroscopy Societies

  • Malcom E. Pruitt Award, Council for Chemical Research

  • The Analytical Chemistry Award, The American Chemical Society

  • Ralph N. Adams Award, The Pittsburgh Conference

  • Fellow of the American Chemical Society

  • Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Fields of Analytical Chemistry, Eastern Analytical Symposium

  • Viktor Mutt prize, International Regulatory Peptide Society

  • Theophilus Redwood Lecturer, Royal Society of Chemistry

  • Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award, SACP

  • The Heinrich-Emanuel Merck Prize

  • Instrumentation Award, ACS Analytical Division

  • Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

  • The Gill Prize in Instrumentation and Measurement Science

  • Benedetti-Pichler Award in Microanalysis

  • Beckman Fellow, Center for Advanced Study

  • ACS Arthur Findeis Award for Young Analytical Scientists

  • Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar

  • University Scholar Award

  • David and Lucile Packard Fellowship

  • Searle Scholar

  • Alfred P. Sloan Fellow

  • NSF Young Investigator