Muir Earns Enzyme Chemistry Award from ACS
Tom Muir, the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of 1965 Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded the 2025 Bristol Myers Squibb Award in Enzyme Chemistry and Chemical Biology from the ACS Division of Biochemistry and Chemical Biology for his remarkable contributions to the field.
The award, now in its third year, seeks to honor a prominent scientist whose research impact is unusually significant and far-reaching. Muir was selected for his contributions to peptide and protein chemistry and for the variety of chemical tools developed in the Muir Lab that are now widely employed in academia and industry.
“These chemical tools have yielded detailed functional insights in many systems including protein kinases, ion channels, and chromatin,” Jay Schneekloth, chair of the Division, mentioned in an email announcing the award. “His work on chromatin, which remains a major focus of his group, has yielded fundamental insights into many epigenetic processes, including how enzymes that act on chromatin are regulated by post-translational modifications on histones and how cancer-associated histone mutations corrupt transcriptional programs and transform cells.
“He is also well known for his work in bacterial quorum sensing where, over the course of two decades, he has dissected the signaling pathways that control virulence in Staphylococci.”
Tom Muir, the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of 1965 Professor of Chemistry.
Muir noted that the work on Staphylococci represents the longest-running project in his lab so this award is particularly gratifying.
“It is always wonderful when the lab’s contributions are recognized by the broader community,” said Muir. “Receiving this award was a particularly nice bright spot given the current science climate we are all trying to navigate.
“Also, I was thrilled that this award recognized both our work on chromatin regulation and quorum sensing in Staphylococci. The latter area is very close to my heart, so it was lovely to have that recognized.”
The announcement also noted that this research yielded the first global inhibitors of a bacterial quorum sensing pathway and demonstrated that these molecules can prevent common staph infections in animals.
The ACS Spring 2026 meeting will include a symposium in Muir’s honor organized around his lab’s research mission.
The award is administered by the Division and sponsored by Bristol Myers Squibb. Past winners include Craig Crews of Yale University and Benjamin Cravatt of the Scripps Research Institute.
The ACS Division of Biochemistry and Chemical Biology was founded in 1913 by chemists who recognized the dominant role played by chemistry in biological systems.