Dr. Seth Herzon

Biography

Seth Herzon completed his undergraduate studies at Temple University and obtained his PhD in 2006 from Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Andrew G. Myers. He was a NIH postdoctoral fellow with Professor John F. Hartwig at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, before joining Yale University in 2008. Currently, he is the Milton Harris ’29 Ph.D. Professor at Yale, with joint appointments in the Departments of Pharmacology and Therapeutic Radiology at the Yale School of Medicine. He is also a member of the Yale Cancer Center. Herzon's research focuses on organic synthesis, particularly the molecular mechanisms of action and structure–function studies of anticancer microbiome-derived secondary metabolites. He co-founded Modifi Biosciences, an oncology company acquired by Merck. He served as an associate editor for the Journal of Organic Chemistry from 2018 to 2023 and has received numerous awards including the NSF CAREER Award and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society. He has also been involved with the United States Defense Science Study Group from 2018 to 2019. Herzon's laboratory emphasizes total synthesis of complex secondary metabolites and aims to develop novel synthetic methods and chemotherapies that exploit tumor-associated DNA repair defects.

Research Interests