M.G. Finn

M.G. Finn received a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from Caltech in 1980, and a Ph.D. degree in 1986 from MIT working with Prof. K.B. Sharpless, followed by an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. J.P. Collman at Stanford University. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1988, where his group studied and developed a variety of transition metal-mediated synthetic methods. Prof. Finn moved to the Department of Chemistry and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in 1998, and then to the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry and the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013. He assumed the chairmanship of the former department in 2014. Prof. Finn’s current interests include the use of virus particles as molecular and catalytic building blocks for vaccine and functional materials development, the discovery of click reactions for organic and materials synthesis, polyvalent interactions and advanced linker technologies in drug targeting, and the use of evolution for the discovery of chemical function. He is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center, a joint effort of Georgia Tech, the Emory University Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, to bring new science and engineering to the aid of pediatric medicine. He holds the James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology. Graduates from the Finn laboratory can be found in academic departments around the world, as well as in companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, chemical, and materials industries. Prof. Finn was the first recipient of the annual Scripps Outstanding Mentor Award, a 2017 Arthur C. Cope Scholar award, and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal ACS Combinatorial Science from 2010 to 2020.