Dirk Trauner has joined Penn as a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, with joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine.
Born in Austria, Trauner began his career in the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Munich before joining NYU in 2017. He was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2017 and has received the Otto Bayer Award, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society, the Emil Fischer Medal of the German Chemical Society, the Kitasato Microbial Chemistry Medal, and a National Science Foundation Career Award, among numerous other honors. He has been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, and University of Zurich and delivered honorary lectures at Beijing University, Nankai University, the Israel Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, and the University of Oxford. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Vienna and an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the Free University of Berlin.