Dr. Vladimir Gevorgyan
- Professor of Chemistry
- Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry
A gift from the Robert A. Welch Foundation in September 1998 created the chair, which is designed to encourage advancements in the field of chemistry in Texas. Gevorgyan was appointed to the chair in September 2019.
“My research area involves uncovering new reactions in organic chemistry that will allow us to synthesize a broad range of organic molecules of practical importance in polymer and materials science, biology and medical applications.”
Dr. Vladimir Gevorgyan’s research focuses on developing new methods to synthesize molecules that are valuable building blocks in synthetic organic chemistry and materials science and are of pharmaceutical relevance.
Research in his lab focuses on developing and understanding new chemical processes from which tools that are more powerful, more selective and more environmentally safe can be created, then used in a variety of new fields.
Gevorgyan’s approach to chemical synthesis includes an understanding of the issues of efficiency and environmental impact. He is interested in simplifying the synthesis of compounds by understanding exactly how to bring their components together. His methods aim to create environmentally benign reactions that consume all the materials that go into making the final product, eliminating waste byproducts.
Gevorgyan also is an advocate of research-based undergraduate education. He started undergraduate research during his freshman year, and since then, has been a vibrant promoter of the importance of undergraduate research in the career development of scientists. Many of the talented undergraduates working in his lab have published their research in peer-reviewed journals and have gone on to pursue graduate studies.
“Our goal is to establish a center of excellence at UT Dallas for reaction discovery and high-throughput synthesis. This center would involve launching a close collaboration among a broad range of scientists at UTD and UT Southwestern Medical Center, including synthetic chemists and biologists, which is unprecedented in Texas,” he said.
A native of Russia, Gevorgyan completed his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Kuban State University and received his PhD from the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis. He spent two years doing postdoctoral research at Tohoku University in Japan and a year as a visiting professor with the National Research Council of Italy in Bologna before joining Tohoku University’s faculty.
In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where he led the chemistry department’s organic chemistry division. He received UIC’s Researcher of the Year Award in 2008 and was named the Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2012. In 2016, he was elected a foreign member of Latvian Academy of Sciences. He joined UT Dallas in 2019.