Dr Pilch

Editor-in-Chief: Dr Daniel Pilch

Dr Pilch is an Associate Professor of Pharmacology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.  He earned his Baccalaureate degree in Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1981.  After spending several years working in the industrial sector, he joined the laboratory of Richard H. Shafer at the University of California, San Francisco, where he conducted doctoral work centered on higher order nucleic acid structure and chemistry.  He earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1991, whereupon he was awarded a Chateaubriand Fellowship by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to conduct postdoctoral work with Claude Hélène in the Biophysics Laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.  After two years in Paris, where he focused on the development of small molecules that target nucleic acids in a structure-specific manner, he moved back across the Atlantic to continue his postdoctoral work in small molecule-nucleic acid recognition with Kenneth J. Breslauer at Rutgers University.  In 1998, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

His current research interests are centered on the design and development of novel antimicrobial and anticancer agents.  In this connection, he employs a multidisciplinary approach toward understanding the molecular determinants of drug action and specificity, overcoming mechanisms of drug resistance, and enhancing drug bioavailability. 

He has served on Study Sections for both the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health.  He was the recipient of a New Investigator Award from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and has served as a scientific consultant to the pharmaceutical industry in connection with the application of calorimetric techniques for drug screening and identification.

Apart from his scientific endeavors, he is a devoted family man and avid baseball fan, with interests that include music and archaeology.