We are delighted to announce that former Damon Runyon-Illini 4000 Fellow Daniel J. Blair, PhD, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, has been named a 2022 STAT Wunderkind. This award, granted annually to “the best early-career researchers in health and medicine in North America,” recognizes Dr. Blair’s exceptional promise in the field of synthetic chemistry.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Blair developed a new type of chemical building block for the construction of very complex 3D molecules. With the help of a molecule-building machine, also pioneered by Dr. Blair’s team, these “Lego-like” building blocks can be assembled into new pharmaceuticals, synthetic enzymes, diagnostic probes, and much more.

This development has especially exciting implications for cancer treatment, which increasingly relies on small-molecule targeted therapies to inhibit mutant proteins or bolster immune response. With the team’s molecular building kit, such small-molecule targeted therapies can be assembled “with a few keystrokes and clicks” and tweaked one building block at a time.

For Dr. Blair, the STAT Wunderkind award comes as a vote of confidence just as he is launching his own lab at St Jude.

“I feel so lucky to be part of such a supportive scientific family,” he says of Damon Runyon. “I’ll be sure to pay forward the belief you have shown in me to my team—once I recruit one—and on multiple other levels as I grow my lab.”

Read more: 2022 STAT Wunderkinds