William L. Jorgensen (born October 5, 1949, New York) is a Sterling Professor of Chemistry at Yale University.[1] He is considered a pioneer in the field of computational chemistry. Some of his contributions include the TIP3P, TIP4P, and TIP5P water models, the OPLS force field, and his work on free-energy perturbation theory for modeling reactions in solution; he has over 300 publications in the field. Jorgensen currently holds the position of editor of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling and the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, and was formerly the editor of the Journal of Computational Chemistry and one of the editors of the Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry. He holds positions on the editorial advisory boards of several other journals, has been involved in the founding of multiple biotechnology companies. Jorgensen also develops and sells software to pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and academic researchers for drug design and other research applications.
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Jorgensen earned a Bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1970 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975 in Chemical Physics while studying under Elias J. Corey. Jorgensen then worked at Purdue University from 1975-1990 first as an Assistant Professor and then later as a Professor. He joined the Yale faculty in 1990 and has remained there since. Prof. Jorgensen has received numerous awards, including the 2004 Sato Memorial International Award from the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan, the 2004 Award in Computational Biology from the Intl. Society for Quantum Biology & Pharmacology, the ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research, the 1990 ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, and the 1986 Annual Medal of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. In 2009 he was named Sterling Professor--Yale's highest academic rank. In 2010 he was elected to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. In 2011 Jorgensen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Jorgensen's research interests are broad and include the calculation of free energy of reactions using quantum mechanics, molecular mechanics, and Metropolis Monte Carlo methods, with application to the calculation of protein-ligand binding affinities, which have pharmaceutical applications. Most generally, the research goals include the development of theoretical and computational methods in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the structure and reactivity for organic and biomolecular systems. Another relevant research topic of his is in the development of improved NNRTI's, which are used for the treatment of HIV.