Booth and Luesch recently welcomed to the medicinal chemistry department

Raymond G. Booth, Ph.D., an associate professor, and Hendrik Luesch, an assistant professor, are two new faculty members recently welcomed to the medicinal chemistry department.

Booth comes to UF from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was an associate professor of medicinal chemistry and toxicology. He received a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California at San Francisco, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. Booth’s research focuses on specific protein molecules in the brain that can be targeted by new drugs to treat the progression of a disease and its associated impairments in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and neuropsychiatric disorders, with the goal of developing new drug treatment for brain injury or diseases.

Luesch recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He received a diploma in chemistry from the University of Siegen in Germany, and a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Luesch’s research focus is in small molecules that may have biomedical utility for treatment of diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders. His studies include marine natural products, such as blue-green algae, which may prove useful in the discovery of new drugs to fight cancer. He also uses genomics to identify and characterize genes associated with disease processes.