Past President

Geoff Cordell obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Univ. Manchester (UK) where his mentors included Arthur Birch and George Smith. Following a postdoc at MIT with George Büchi, he joined the College of Pharmacy, Univ. Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 1972, became a Professor in 1980, and retired in 2007. During this period he served in several administrative positions, including as a Department Head for 12 years, and as Interim Dean of the College of Pharmacy for nearly three years. His research has spanned the discovery of anticancer and antimalarial agents from plants, the application of new NMR techniques, the chemistry of acronycine, and the biosynthesis of indolocarbazole alkaloids. He has published over 560 papers, book chapters, and reviews, has been the editor of 32 books, including 27 volumes in the series “The Alkaloids: Chemistry and Biology”, and has also served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of 18 journals; he is very proud of his book “Introduction to Alkaloids: A Biosynthetic Approach.” He is the Foreign Director of the Sichuan Institute for TCM in Chengdu, China; an Honorary Professor at Sichuan University; was a co-founder of a US-Thai collaboration, initiating six new Thai schools of pharmacy and many new grad. programs; has spoken worldwide about the need to enhance research on the quality control and sustainable development of traditional medicines as a global health care issue; is studying the use of vegetables as sustainable reagents for chiral synthesis; serves as a consultant in several countries for the development of natural product research programs; and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Chemical Society, the Linnean Society of London, and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. His wish for the future of the ASP is that it take up the challenge of promoting natural products research as an integral aspect of global health care. (GAC)