People of ASP

John Cassady was born in 1938 and grew up in Illinois. He received a B.A. from DePauw University in 1960 (in chemistry) and an M.S. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) from Western Reserve Univ. (Organic Chemistry). He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow (1965-1966) at the Univ. Wisconsin in Morris Kupchan’s lab, working on the isolation and structure elucidation of tumor inhibitors from plants. In 1966 he joined the faculty of the Purdue University School of Pharmacy as an Assistant Prof. in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy. He was promoted to Associate Professor (1970) and Professor (1974). Shortly after that, he was appointed Associate Department Head (1976) and then Department Head (1980), and in 1987, he was named the Glenn L. Jenkins Distinguished Professor of Med. Chem. and Pharmacognosy. In 1988, he accepted the position of Dean of The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy, a post he held until 2003, when he returned to the faculty as Professor Emeritus. In 2005 he was appointed Vice President for Research at Oregon State University, and he still serves in that position. John has been a member of the ASP since 1966, and has been very active in the Society. He served on the nominating and publicity committees, was scientific program chairman for the 1976 annual meeting, was elected to the Executive Committee (1978-1981), and serves as Chair of the ASP Foundation Board (1994-present). John’s research interests involve the discovery and design of anticancer drugs from natural products, specifically, the isolation, structure elucidation, and chemical studies of antitumor and chemopreventive agents from plants, and the synthesis of potential antitumor agents. He received the Research Achievement award in Natural Products Chemistry from the APhA (1990). (JMC)