Jon T. Njardarson, PhD

2025 Distinguished Professor Award

Jon was born and raised in the small town of Akranes, Iceland. After graduation, Jon moved to Reykjavik to start his studies at the University of Iceland, where he became fascinated by the wonders of Organic Chemistry. Jon then traveled across the ocean to Yale University to pursue his doctoral studies with Professor John L. Wood, where he worked on the total synthesis of natural products and developing new reactions.  After graduation, Jon moved from Yale to New York City to train as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Samuel J. Danishefsky at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) as a General Motors Cancer Research Scholar. Jon moved to Ithaca, NY in 2004 to start his independent career at Cornell University. In 2010, Jon and his group loaded the wagons, journeyed across the continent, and settled in Tucson where he is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arizona. Jon’s group works on diverse organic synthesis topics such as new reaction development, total syntheses, drug discovery, novel material chemistry and most recently machine learning.  Jon is the creator of the popular Top 200 Drug poster series and the widely used app/website Chemistry By Design (CByD).

Since starting his independent career in 2004 (20 years), Jon has taught organic chemistry to undergraduate and graduate students at Cornell University (2004-2009) and the University of Arizona (2010-present) with class sizes ranging from 7 to 728 students. During this period, Jon has established a thriving well-funded large high-profile productive research program, advised and mentored graduate students, undergraduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Jon loves teaching undergraduate students’ organic chemistry and is particularly proud of the fact that he has to date taught more undergraduate students than 90%+ of U of A research active tenure track faculty while growing his scientific footprint.

Jon has taught 40 full semester organic chemistry lecture courses (75% undergraduate, 30/40), a total of 6509 students enrolled in organic lecture courses (98% undergraduate, 6392/6509). These 40 full semester organic chemistry lecture courses represent 1600+ in class lecture hours and a total of 19527 student credit hours.