Greg Thatcher, PhD, joined the University of Arizona in 2020 from the University of Illinois College of Pharmacy. In his career, he has graduated over 50 students with PhD’s and a dozen with MSc’s and mentored 40 undergraduate researchers, the majority while on faculty in the Chemistry Department at Queen's University in Canada from 1988 until 2002. These trainees have proceeded to positions in biotech, pharma, business, education, and academia in the USA, Canada, Europe, India, and China. While at the University of Illinois in Chicago UIC) Thatcher acted as founder/leader of the Translational Oncology Program in the University of Illinois Cancer Center and co-director of the NIA Predoctoral Training Program in Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementia. In 2013, he founded a campus-wide and disease-agnostic drug discovery center at UIC, focused on small molecule drug discovery, which continues to play an active role in academic drug discovery across Chicago. Dr. Thatcher created his first start-ubiotech company in 1997, which successfully took an Alzheimer’s drugs into human clinical trials. Thatcher’s trainees receive a multidisciplinary education in modern aspects of medicinal chemistry, chemical biology, and chemical toxicology: the underpinning of drug discovery and development. Students who graduate with expertise in synthetic medicinal chemistry will have competency in another area, such as drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics; and students who graduate with expertise in cell/molecular biology or biochemistry will be experts in bioassay design and have competency in drug discovery. The Thatcher lab’s research has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2003, supported by NCI, NIA, NHLBI, NIAID, and NCCAM, resulting in over 170 publications and dozens of issued patents. Two new chemical entities were licensed and successfully completed Phase 1 clinical trials for metastatic breast cancer in 2019.