Madeleine M. Joullié

Another particularly interesting area of research has involved the Didemnin class of macrocyclic depsipeptide. Derived from a marine tunicate of the family Didemnidae, didemnins exhibit antitumor, antiviral and immunosuppressive qualities. Joullié's asymmetric total synthesis of didemnin B in 1990 was a landmark event leading to fundamental contributions to both the chemistry and biology of this intriguing class of natural products. Didemnin B was the first marine natural product to be used in clinical trials against cancer. Joullié has produced several didemnin analogs. She has also developed probe molecules that can trace didemnins, allowing researchers to more effectively study their biological activities.

Since then, much of Joullié's research has focused on the synthesis of natural products. In 1980, she reported the first asymmetric total synthesis of the antibiotic (+)-furanomycin, the first use of the Ugi 4CC in the synthesis of a non-proteinogenic amino acid. She helped to develop methodologies for aromatic substitution, and introduced the term "chirality transfer". Her subsequent work has led to the total synthesis of several natural products, including muscarine, geiparvarin, ascofuranone, furanomycin, and dihydromauritine A.

Joullié is also an active researcher in organic chemistry who has published three textbooks of organic chemistry, more than 18 review articles, and more than 300 scientific papers. Her work in synthesizing organic compounds such as tilorone, furanomycin, and numerous cyclopeptides has led to the development of antibiotic and antiviral drugs. Joullié has received numerous awards, including the 1978 Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society, in recognition of her accomplishments in teaching and research.

In 1970, Joullié and Mildred Cohn worked on the Committee on the Status of Women, which gathered data and documented the second-class status of women at Penn. The percentage of women holding faculty positions was far below the percentage of qualified women Ph.D.'s, and those women who had positions held lower rank, received lower salaries, and waited longer for promotion. The committee developed affirmative action guidelines, supporting the university's efforts to recruit more women and minority faculty.

Later in the 1970s, dean Vartan Gregorian appointed her as one of the first affirmative action officers at the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1976 and 1980, Joullié reviewed the hiring and promotions processes of the School of Arts and Science, comparing resumes of male and female candidates. On some occasions, when she felt that qualified women had been ignored in the hiring process, she flatly refused to sign off on new hires. Her effectiveness in the position led Provost Eliot Stellar to appoint her as the chair of the university's Council for Equal Opportunity, overseeing affirmative action in all departments. Of her affirmative action activities, Joullié says:

Early in her career, her Ph.D. advisor, Allan R. Day, interested her in heterocyclic compounds, and she did early work with aromatic and heterocyclic scaffolds and fluorinated heterocycles. She also did significant research on heterocyclic ketones in the 1970s, collaborating with Peter Yates of the University of Toronto, and receiving the 1972 ACS Philadelphia Section Award. In the early 1970s, she successfully synthesized tilorone, an interferon inducer which helps to protect cells.

Joullié received a Fulbright scholarship to lecture at the University of Brazil (1965). While there, she wrote a textbook in Portuguese on heterocyclic chemistry. She has also been a visiting professor at Columbia University (1968), CRNS (Grenoble, France, 1987), the University of California at Santa Barbara (1989), and Cambridge, England (1997), but the majority of her career has been spent at the University of Pennsylvania. Joullié became a full professor in 1974.

In 1953, Madeleine Joullié joined the University of Pennsylvania chemistry faculty, the first woman to do so. Originally in a non-tenure-track position, Joullié taught undergraduate organic chemistry five days a week and ran the lab. In her first five years, none of the graduate students would work with her, so she carried out research in collaboration with undergraduates. As more women entered the department, first female and later male graduate students began to work with her.

Joullié moved to the United States to study in 1946. She obtained a B.S. degree in chemistry from Simmons College, a women's college in Boston, in 1949. Then she moved to Philadelphia, where she was the only full-time female graduate student in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. There weren't even bathrooms for women in the chemistry building. She earned an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1953. She worked with Allan R. Day, who inspired Joullié as both a researcher and a teacher.

Also at the university, Joullié met Richard E. Prange (1932–2008), a condensed matter theorist in the physics department. They married in 1959.

Madeleine M. Joullié (born March 29, 1927) is a French-born American organic chemist. She was the first woman to join the University of Pennsylvania chemistry faculty as well as the first female organic chemist to be appointed to a tenure track position in a major American university. She was one of the first affirmative action officers at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a distinguished record as a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate-level organic chemistry, and as a mentor of students.