September 9, 2024  — The UVA Medical Alumni Association is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Achievement Award in Biomedical Sciences: William Wimley, PhD ’90.

Dr. Wimley is the George A. Adrouny Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Tulane University School of Medicine, New Orleans, La.  He has devoted his career to solving the daunting challenge of developing and understanding peptides that have activities targeted to specific biological membranes. To address this problem, he developed a novel method which enables the evolution and optimization of peptides with complex bioactivities. His research on membrane-active peptides is helping to solve some of the most important problems facing humanity. For example, one focus of the Wimley lab has been the synthetic evolution of novel families of peptide antibiotics that can treat drug-resistant bacterial infections, to help fight the alarming rise in otherwise untreatable infections. Another focus of the lab is the development of new drug delivery chemotypes that address the urgent need to enable delivery of novel bioactive macromolecular drugs to the cell interior to treat challenging diseases such as cancer. Dr. Wimley’s most recent NIH grant supports the study of synthetically evolved pH-responsive peptide nanopores, which he and his collaborators developed, that can deliver protein cargoes to the interior of target cells including cancer cells.

Dr. Wimley has an uninterrupted 34-year record of peer-reviewed publications starting with his first paper, which was published in 1990 while he was still at UVA. He also holds five US patents based on discoveries made in his lab. His research in the field of membrane biophysics has been impactful. As a postdoc, he published a series of influential papers describing the “Wimley-White hydrophobicity scales” which remain widely used today in bioinformatics and structural biology. To enable the discovery and optimization of membrane-active peptides, Dr. Wimley developed a synthetic molecular evolution-based high-throughput approach that has been used for optimization of many different families of bioactive peptides. In addition to his translational work, Dr. Wimley has contributed significantly to understanding the fundamental mechanistic principles of membrane-active peptides. In a number of prominent, widely cited review papers, he has defined the “interfacial activity model” to describe the mechanism of peptide antibiotics and has developed the concept of “mechanistic landscapes” to describe multiple families of membrane-active peptides.

He has been continuously funded by NIH, NSF, or other grant agencies since his first NIH grant at Tulane in 1999. He has published 125 peer reviewed papers, including 24 papers published since 2020.

Dr. Wimley has also contributed significantly to the education of Tulane’s interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences PhD students. After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, he became the director of the Graduate Biochemistry course, a required core course, taken by all PhD students. In 2006, he responded to the lack of statistical training of Tulane’s PhD students by launching a new core course in Biomedical Statistics and Data Analysis. This course, designed from the ground up and taught solely by Dr. Wimley, has been so popular for nearly 20 years that PhD students from other programs, as well as postdocs, and even faculty, routinely take the course.

Congratulations to Dr. Wimley on this well-deserved recognition.