Peter Dervan

Dervan has received a number of awards for both research and teaching, including those listed below. He was awarded the 2006 National Medal of Science in 2007 from President George Bush at the White House for “his fundamental research contributions at the interface of organic chemistry and biology” as well as contributions to education and industry. A minor planet has been named in his honor, 4314 Dervan.

In 1990, Dervan married Jacqueline Barton, a fellow chemist and professor at Caltech. He has a son, Andrew, from a previous marriage, and a daughter, Elizabeth, from his marriage with Barton. All four hold degrees from Yale University.

Dervan is a co-founder and founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Gilead Sciences (1987). He served on the Board of Directors for Beckman Coulter beginning in 1997. He served as a Trustee of Yale University (2008-2017). He serves as a member of the Board of Scientific Governors of The Scripps Research Institute. In 2014, he presented the ACS Chemical Biology Lecture. As of 2016 he became chair of the scientific advisory board of the Robert A. Welch Foundation.

Dervan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1987), and the American Philosophical Society (2002). He is an elected member of the French Academy of Sciences (2000) and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (2004- ).

Dervan became an assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech in 1973, joining John D. Roberts, Robert G. Bergman and Robert Ellsworth Ireland in the organic chemistry group. He became an associate professor in 1979, and professor in 1982. He was appointed as the first Bren Professor of Chemistry in 1988. He served as Chair of Caltech's Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 1994 to 1999. Dervan has published more than 325 papers and taught hundreds of students.

Peter B. Dervan (born June 28, 1945) is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is the development and study of small organic molecules that can sequence-specifically recognize DNA, a field in which he is an internationally recognized authority. The most important of these small molecules are pyrrole–imidazole polyamides. Dervan is credited with influencing "the course of research in organic chemistry through his studies at the interface of chemistry and biology" as a result of his work on "the chemical principles involved in sequence-specific recognition of double helical DNA". He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Medal of Science (2006).

Peter B. Dervan was born on June 28, 1945 in Boston, Massachusetts. Dervan received his B.S. degree from Boston College in 1967, where professor Francis Bennett sparked his interest in synthetic organic chemistry. He began graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin then moved with Jerome A. Berson's research group to Yale University where he completed his graduate research in physical organic chemistry, studying ways in which chemical bonds are created and broken apart. He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale in 1972, for The Stereochemistry of the Thermal Rearrangements of Trans-1,2-Dialkenylcyclobutanes and Cis-1,2-Dialkenylcyclobutanes. He then became an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Stanford.