Prof Anna Hirsch

Anna K. H. Hirsch is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Saarland University and head of the department for drug design and optimization at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS). She read Natural Sciences with a focus on Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and spent her third year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doing a research project with Prof. Timothy Jamison. She carried out her Master’s research project in the group of Prof. Steven V. Ley at the University of Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. from the ETH Zurich in 2008 in the group of Prof. François Diederich. Subsequently, she joined the group of Prof. Jean-Marie Lehn at the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg as an HFSP postdoctoral fellow, before taking up a position as an assistant professor at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry at the University of Groningen in 2010 where she was promoted to associate professor in 2015. Her work focuses on anti-infective drug design by adopting rational approaches such as structure- and fragment-based drug design in combination with the protein-templated strategies  dynamic combinatorial chemistry and kinetic target-guided synthesis. Anna has authored more than 175 peer-reviewed papers and has received numerous awards such as the Gratama Science Prize in 2014, the SCT-Servier Prize for Medicinal  chemistry in 2015, the Innovation Prize for Medicinal Chemistry of the GdCh/DPhG in 2017, in 2019, the EFMC Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia runner-up Prize and in 2024, the RSC Capps Green Zomaya Award.