Sidney Hecht was the John W. Mallet Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Biology at UVA from 1978 – 2008. During his thirty years he led a very productive research group in the areas of synthesis and mechanism of action of bleomycin family antitumor antibiotics, peptidyltransferase as a source of synthetic enzymes, mechanism of action/inhibition of mammalian DNA topoisomerase I, and inhibition of signal transduction at the level of p90RSK. He is the recipient of numerous awards icluding the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1975-79), a National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Award (1975-80), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1977-78), the 1996 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Virginia’s Outstanding Scientist Award (1996), a 1998 Research Achievement Award, American Society of Pharmacognosy and in 2004 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a career spanning more than three decades, Sidney Hecht has held both academic and industrial research positions. From 1981 to 1986 in addition to his professorship at UVA, he held concurrent appointments at Smith Kline & French Laboratories, first as Vice President Preclinical R&D, then Vice President Chemical R&D.  He is currently Director of the Center for BioEnergetics in the Biodesign Institute and Professor of Chemistry at Arizona State University.