Doug E. Frantz, Ph.D.

The Max and Minie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund Endowed Distinguished Professorship in Chemistry

Professor, Chemistry

Doug E. Frantz, the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, was recruited to UTSA in 2009 and has since helped establish the university as one of the premier institutions to study, research and teach organic chemistry in Texas.   

For the past decade, Frantz’s research group at UTSA has collaborated with scientists across the state on multiple therapeutic approaches toward cancer, chronic pain and infectious diseases.

Frantz is also co-founder of the Center for Innovative Drug Discovery (CIDD), a joint drug discovery initiative between UTSA and UT Health San Antonio. The ultimate intent of the CIDD is to provide a diverse array of core facilities and expertise to facilitate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into tangible pre-clinical candidate drugs that can be further developed into clinical therapies for human disease.

Frantz has received several awards including the Thieme Journal Award (2017), Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery Outstanding Collaborator Award (2014), and the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Young Investigator Award (2010). He also served as co-chair of the GRC on Organic Reactions and Processes (2014) and has established the TexSyn conference in 2013 with Prof. Mike Krische at UT Austin to highlight the outstanding research in synthetic organic chemistry in the state of Texas every two years.

Frantz obtained his B.S. in Chemistry at Stephen F. Austin State University under the guidance of James Garrett. He received his Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry at Texas A&M University under the supervision of Dan Singleton where he worked on the synthetic and mechanistic studies of carbometalations reactions.

After earning his Ph.D., Frantz completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Erick Carreira at the ETH – Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland where he discovered and developed the asymmetric addition of zinc acetylides to aldehydes. He then joined the Department of Process Research at Merck & Co., Inc. in 2000 in Rahway, NJ where he worked on the development of practical and efficient syntheses to various drug candidates in Merck’s pipeline. In late 2001, he moved to Wayne, PA to establish a new Merck site.

In 2005, Frantz joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas as a research assistant professor and director of the Synthetic Chemistry Core Facility where he worked until he left to join UTSA's faculty in 2009.