This year Professor David Wiemer closes the doors on an epic University of Iowa chemistry faculty career that spans 48 years (wow!!), which is longer than any other chemistry professor.  He arrived as an Assistant Professor in 1978, coming to us from an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University.  For Professor Wiemer, this was a return to his upper Midwest academic roots as his B.S. in chemistry was from Marquette University followed by a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois. After postdoctoral research on chemical ecology, he began Iowa research using leafcutter ants as his laboratory assistants and examining which chemical species in tropical leaves served as ant repellants.  The Wiemer group’s later research focused on new methods of carbon-phosphorus bond formations.  Creative and challenging synthetic organophosphorus chemistry would mark a good portion of his research career.  In recent years, collaborations with medical oncology faculty enabled the Wiemer group to test the activity of their novel compounds against a range of malignant cells.  Professor Wiemer’s research career has been very productive and recognized for its significance, with at least 60 of his over 230 papers being cited in literature more than 50 times.  He received a Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in 2003. In 2011, Professor Wiemer was honored with a prestigious named chair and became an F. Wendell Miller Professor and in 2020 he received the ACS Midwest Award.  In the past five years, he has not slowed down, publishing 17 articles!  Professor Wiemer’s research program has long and sustained external support, primarily from the NIH with over $13M in research grants. He is particularly pleased to have established long-running collaborative research projects with his son Andrew Wiemer (Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Connecticut) and with Sarah Holstein (Professor of Hematology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center) who once did undergraduate research in his labs 

Professor Wiemer’s successful research career was enabled by his effective mentoring of at least 124 mentees, including 61 Ph.D. graduates, 15 postdoctoral associates, 17 MS students, and at least 31 undergraduates.  He also generously shared his chemical knowledge and research stories with the broader chemistry community, serving for many years as a tour speaker for local ACS sections (more than 160 speaking events!). 

Beyond his research productivity, Professor Wiemer gave our department priceless swaths of his time and effort to build it into what we are today. He took on a long and complex DEO term (2002-2010) and successfully made the case for significant annual faculty hiring (despite a major economic downturn) and coordinated a nearly $50M Chemistry Building renovation (happening around the time of Iowa’s 2008 historic flood).   In his spare time, he was a named inventor on 38 filed US patents and co-founded a small business (Terpenoid Therapeutics, Inc).

We hope you will join us in congratulating Professor David Wiemer on a very successful and impactful Iowa Chemistry faculty career.  If you have a favorite Wiemer group memory, feel free to share it on our Chemistry Department Facebook post!