About
Prof. Dan Whitehead was educated at Furman University and Michigan State University, and has been a faculty member of the Clemson Chemistry department since 2011. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2018. Dr. Whitehead’s bio-organic chemistry lab leverages collaborations across campus, the country, and the globe to tackle difficult problems spanning the development of new organic chemistry reactions, the discovery of new drugs for chronic diseases driven parasites and bacteria, and functional nanomaterials for environmental and biomedical applications.
Visit Dr. Whitehead's Faculty Profile.
How their research is transforming health care
The Whitehead lab seeks to leverage synthetic organic chemistry and chemical biology to develop new potential therapeutics to treat infectious diseases and to leverage tool compounds to study biological processes that are fundamental to human health and disease. Current topics of interest include: a.) new anti-parasitic agents against eukaryotic pathogens including Trypanosoma brucei, Toxoplasma gondii, and Naegleria folweri, and b.) small molecule tool compounds to interrogate the polysaccharide metabolism of prominent human gut bacteria.
Health Research Expertise Keywords
Faculty Scholar, synthetic organic chemistry, anti-parasitic compounds, human gut microbes
