Rate My Professor Amy Dounay

Amy B. Dounay is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Colorado College, where she has served since 2012, initially as an Assistant Professor before her promotion with tenure in 2018. A Colorado College alumna, she earned her B.A. in Chemistry magna cum laude in 1996. She obtained her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 2001 under Professor Craig J. Forsyth, focusing on the synthesis of marine natural products such as okadaic acid derivatives. Following her doctorate, Dounay completed a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine, with Professor Larry E. Overman, developing applications of the intramolecular asymmetric Heck reaction for alkaloid natural product synthesis. Prior to joining Colorado College, she spent eight years at Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development in the Neurosciences Medicinal Chemistry division, advancing from Principal Scientist to Senior Principal Scientist and serving as a laboratory head and chemistry team leader on drug discovery projects for psychiatry and neurodegeneration.

Dounay's research at Colorado College centers on the discovery of new medicines to treat African sleeping sickness (Trypanosoma brucei), employing drug design, synthesis, computational modeling, and biological evaluation through international collaborations. She also leads efforts in Distributed Drug Discovery for antibiotics via combinatorial synthesis and greener pedagogical protocols in organic chemistry laboratories worldwide. Her program has engaged numerous undergraduate students in pharmaceutical industry-style research, including projects on resistant bacteria like Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Funding includes the Boettcher Foundation Webb-Waring Early Career Investigator Biomedical Research Award (2014–2017), Research Corporation for Science Advancement Cottrell College Science Award (2014–2016), and a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant. Key publications encompass total syntheses such as 'Total Synthesis of the Marine Natural Product 7-Deoxy-Okadaic Acid' (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 1999), the review 'The Asymmetric Intramolecular Heck Reaction in Natural Product Total Synthesis' (Chem. Rev., 2003), Pfizer-era work on dual norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors and 5-HT1A agonists (Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett., 2009–2011), and recent contributions like 'Novel 1,2-dihydroquinazolin-2-ones... against Trypanosoma brucei' (Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett., 2017) and 'Globally Distributed Drug Discovery of New Antibiotics' (J. Chem. Educ., 2019). She teaches courses in organic and medicinal chemistry and has delivered invited seminars and presentations at conferences such as the Gordon Research Conference on Medicinal Chemistry.