Michael Jung ’69, Wilfred van der Donk ’94 and Aparna Bhaduri ’10 have received 2025 Alumni Awards from Rice University’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences.
The annual awards honor outstanding professional and societal achievements of distinguished and recent school alumni and will be presented at the school’s 50th anniversary gala and awards dinner during Alumni Weekend Nov. 6-9.
Michael Jung ’69
2025 Distinguished Alumni Award
Jung, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Rice, is being honored for groundbreaking contributions in medicinal chemistry, including the development of FDA-approved therapies that have extended the lives of hundreds of thousands of prostate cancer patients worldwide.
The Walter and Shirley Wang Chair in Medicinal Drug Discovery at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Jung is an inventor on more than 450 patents and patent applications and has collaborated on the design and synthesis of dozens of new drugs, including prostate-cancer drugs enzalutamide and apalutamide, which are sold commercially as Xtandi and Erleada, respectively.
“I set up something that I jokingly called UCLA pharma,” Jung said. “The biologists come with good biology for certain diseases, and then, as chemists, we look at compounds and make them better, make them patentable. I have about 15 collaborations with biologists, and we have four compounds in clinical trials right now.”
The winner of dozens of awards, including the National Academy of Sciences’ 2025 Award for Chemistry in Service of Society, Jung earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and trained as a postdoc at ETH Zurich in Switzerland before joining UCLA in 1974. He said his career could have been very different were it not for exceptional Rice mentors.
“The great thing about Rice is you got to know the professors intimately,” said Jung. “Ron Magid, who taught sophomore organic, was fabulous, as was Ron Sass. A young professor named Tom Cantrell put me into research, and I did that with a number of professors, including Dick Turner. It was fabulous. That one-on-one interaction was the advantage that Rice had over other places with maybe bigger names.”
Wilfred van der Donk ’94
2025 Distinguished Alumni Award
Van der Donk earned his doctorate in chemistry at Rice and is being recognized for groundbreaking discoveries in natural product exploration and for his commitment to identifying novel antibiotic compounds that address the growing, global problem of antibiotic resistance.
“We try to find new molecules from nature that have antimicrobial activity,” said van der Donk, the Richard E. Heckert Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). “We are not the lab that will develop your next antibiotic, but we can point the way as to how industry can do that.”
Van der Donk joined UIUC’s faculty in 1997 following postdoctoral training at MIT. His groundbreaking discoveries in natural product exploration have led to 13 patents and include the co-discovery of both the antibiotic geobacillin and the source of a substantial portion of oceanic methane. The winner of many awards, he was recognized as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2008.
He had planned to return to his native Holland after receiving his Ph.D., but that changed, in part, because of the welcome he experienced at Rice. He fondly recalled tending bar at Valhalla, sharing conversations with faculty members like Lon Wilson and spending holidays with the family of Baudine and J. Fred Duckett ’55. The family hosted more than a dozen foreign graduate students, among them biochemist Jie Chen, whom van der Donk married in Rice Chapel in 1993.
“Jimmy Carter was the commencement speaker,” he said. “We’d managed to get her parents to visit from China and my parents to visit from the Netherlands, and we decided, maybe two weeks in advance, ‘Let’s get married.’ It was quite a month of May.”
Aparna Bhaduri ’10
2025 Recent Alumni Award
Bhaduri, who double-majored in biochemistry and cell biology and in political science, is being honored for early-career achievements using single-cell genomics, bioinformatics and organoid models to study how cell types emerge in both brain development and in brain cancers like glioblastoma.
An assistant professor of biological chemistry at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, she has already amassed 68 publications and 12,000 citations for her work.
She earned a Ph.D. in cancer biology at Stanford, and a coveted, career-accelerating Pathway to Independence award during her postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco. She joined UCLA in 2021 and credits Seichii Matsuda, her Rice undergraduate research mentor, with laying the groundwork for her success.
“I really benefited from Seichii’s dedication and mentorship in terms of the time that he took to work with me as an undergrad,” Bhaduri said. “There’s some really foundational aspects of who I am as a scientist that really are rooted in that experience.”
She said Matsuda respected her ideas and efforts as much as those of Ph.D. scientists and graduate students. And she knew that wouldn’t change if she made mistakes. “It was okay to not get it right, to just be learning and be honest about what I knew and didn’t know. It gave me this model for what it looks like to be invested in your students, and also how I wanted to run my own lab.”
Undergraduates make up about one third of her UCLA research group, which studies the stem cells from which our brains develop.
“The really big things that we’re trying to understand are, ‘How do stem cells make the human brain?’ and ‘Why are these stem cells deadly in the context of brain cancer?’” she said.